Edith’s weakness for men in uniform made it almost inevitable that she would find someone with the strength she desired. Before a performance at the Colonial Infantry barracks (the branch that her brother, Herbert, joined), a handsome blond soldier asked if he might pay for his seat with a kiss. Edith agreed. “As for the kiss,” she told him, “we’ll see about that later, provided you behave yourself,” Piaf recalled in the first account of their affair. That night, she fell in love and considered leaving Louis for this man, even though he often landed in the brig. Her soldier went AWOL the next day to see her; they discussed the hopelessness of their situation, and, after a night together, parted. “I was shattered,” Piaf said, “mourning for the happiness I’d lost just when I’d found it.” Their story was like a cheap romance novel, she said years later.
P’tit Louis may not have known about this man, but he soon realized that Edith no longer loved him. He pleaded with her to stay with him for Cécelle’s sake. Edith’s father and stepmother were called in. They tried to reason with her, but she had already decided to leave. “And when Edith decided on something,” Denise wrote, “there was no point in trying to make her change her mind.”
Soon she began exploring Montmartre, the raffish neighborhood where some of the performers she knew sang in clubs. With Momone, who came back at the first opportunity, she went to sing out of doors at the Place du Tertre and at the Lapin Agile, the cabaret where the chanson-réaliste tradition began. The chanteuse Rina Ketty, who befriended her there, was struck by the newcomer: “She interpreted those songs with such intensity that it hit you right in the gut. When she sang she was a great lady. Afterward it wasn’t the same. She was surrounded by men, all drinking, smoking, having a good time.”
One day, on the way down the hill from Montmartre to Pigalle, Edith and Momone met the owner of a nightclub, a woman named Lulu, who dressed like a man. After an audition, Lulu booked them to appear at the club, because, she explained, her customers liked girls who looked as if they had just stepped off the street.
This engagement gave Edith the idea that she might have a profession. By the 1930s, Fréhel, Damia, and Edith’s new model, Marie Dubas, were all starring at the Paris music-halls. People often stopped in bars to hear their records; their posters decorated the city’s thoroughfares. There was no reason why Edith could not become one of them—except that she would have to be discovered, which was more likely to happen in Pigalle than in Belleville.
P’tit Louis quarreled with Edith about her new job. In his opinion, Lulu’s was a joint frequented by hookers and lesbians. He issued an ultimatum: she must refuse the offer, or their life together was finished. The choice was not difficult. Edith packed her belongings and with Cécelle, who was already a toddler, joined Momone in Pigalle.
CHAPTER THREE
1933–1935
By the time Edith moved to Pigalle, the artists who had lived there and in Montmartre before the war—Picasso and company—had mostly decamped to Montparnasse and other more respectable parts of Paris. Though Montmartre’s bohemian past still drew tourists, especially foreign ones, visitors in search of local color were more likely to go slumming in the nightclubs that dotted the streets of lower Montmartre, as Pigalle was called—where small-time crooks, members of le milieu (the French mafia), and upstanding citizens intermingled. In the 1930s, when Edith was absorbing the area’s louche atmosphere, Pigalle had already acquired mythic status as “the most intense chapter in the history of Paris’s lower depths—but lower depths, unlike those of Belleville, that are inseparable from their suggestive setting.”
P’tit Louis had been right about the high concentration of hookers in the area. Pigalle’s many small hotels offered rooms by the hour as well as for the night. Edith moved, with and without Momone, from one alluringly named hotel to another. After some time at the Hôtel Eden, which had the advantage of a cheap restaurant next door, she settled at the Régence. It became her headquarters, the site of her education in local mores, and the place where she left Cécelle when performing at Lulu’s. She soon learned that it was also a meeting place for le milieu.
As its proprietor’s mannish dress implied, Lulu’s welcomed women who liked women, along with a mixed clientele of prostitutes, crooks, and partygoers. Momone’s juvenile form (“I didn’t have any bosom or any behind,” she wrote) appealed to Lulu’s customers; they liked the slim, undernourished bodies of waifs like her and Edith. To enhance their ambiguous appeal, Lulu dressed them both in sailor costumes, though Momone often shed hers to perform gymnastics in the nude.
The two friends got on well with the hookers who waited there for clients, and with a sympathetic garçon who fed them the remains from customers’ meals. But Lulu rarely kept their agreement about wages. If the girls were even five minutes late, she deducted ten francs from their salary. (“It’s not easy to arrive bang on time without a watch,” Berteaut wrote, “especially when you don’t have any notion of time.”) To make extra money, they “collected corks,” which meant chatting with customers while they downed champagne, then presenting the corks at closing time—to be paid so much per bottle. Their nights often lasted until dawn. When Edith had the energy, she stumbled into the street to sing before going to bed. There she felt more like herself.
Piaf’s memoirs are reticent about this period. Au bal de la chance (The Wheel of Fortune) omits the Pigalle years; Ma vie (My Life) reduces her time among the local pimps and prostitutes to a series of affairs, including one with the man who became her protector—though he offered a different type of protection from the sort she had imagined. But if Piaf preferred to forget the dark poetry of Pigalle, its smoky atmosphere colored her songs, the sulfurous repertoire for which she became known.
To pass the time at Lulu’s, the pianist encouraged her to sing “C’était un musicien,” a tango tune that could have been their theme song: “C’était un musicien qui jouait dans une boîte de nuit / Jusqu’aux lueurs de l’aube il berçait les amours d’autrui.” (“He was a musician who played in the nightclub / Until dawn lulling other people’s loves to sleep.” The song was popularized by a 1933 film with the same title.) The happy ending (a female customer falls for the musician) was exceptional in Edith’s repertoire. Customers preferred fatalistic songs like “Comme un moineau,” the better to savor the congruence between Edith’s slender form and the tale of a prostitute who, “like a sparrow,” is inured to the street: “On s’accoutume à ne plus voir / La poussière grise du trottoir / Où l’on se vautre / Chaque soir sur l’pavé parigot / On cherche son pain dans le ruisseau.” (“You get used to not seeing / The dusty gray sidewalk / Where revelers wallow / Each night on the Paris streets / You seek your living in the gutter.”) Within a few years, composers would write similar songs just for her—evoking Pigalle’s varied opportunities for oblivion and pleasure.
“There is nothing to see in Pigalle,” a contemporary novelist wrote. The area bounded by the Place Blanche to the west and the rue des Martyrs to the east had no historic landmarks. But for the cognoscenti there was another reality behind its undistinguished façades. Pigalle had a tawdry allure for partygoers and thrill-seekers—“dark nights lit by flickering electric signs, the sound of rain and piano rolls, a hubbub, silence, dance halls, shadowy corners, neon lights, hallways”—the décor we associate with the film noir classics that were often set there.
Those who lived year-round in Pigalle were attuned to its delights. The Cirque Medrano had its headquarters on the prolongation of Pigalle’s main axis, the Boulevard de Clichy. Picasso had often painted the Medrano’s clowns and acrobats; locals drank with them after performances. The neighborhood became particularly animated in December, when a street fair lined the Boulevard de Clichy with fortune-tellers, shooting galleries, sideshows, merry-go-rounds, and stands selling French fries or sugary waffles. Strong men and sword swallowers performed there all year round; musicians gathered on the weekends in hope of a night’s employment. One can imagine Edith greeting them on
her way to Lulu’s, or when she worked the street on her days off.
As emancipated but unprotected women, she and Momone were an anomaly—much like the filles insoumises, the unregistered prostitutes who made Pigalle notorious. Residents recognized the different types of whores, from the lowly pierreuses, who took all comers, to the chandelles, who stood like candles under the lamplights, and the marcheuses, who walked up and down the boulevards—the trade’s aristocracy, because they had some freedom of choice. Working in Pigalle gave a woman cachet. Her pay was higher than elsewhere in Paris; compared with Belleville, Pigalle was a promotion.
Yet most of these women were controlled by pimps, many of whom came from the same poor neighborhoods. These men, known as julots, harengs, or maquereaux, affected a certain style. They strutted around Pigalle in the tight jackets and shiny leather pumps then in fashion in petit-bourgeois areas. Newcomers saw that to survive, they needed to distinguish among the local fauna and learn their codes. Edith’s odd status attracted attention. Was she a grenouille, one of the many young women calling themselves singers who took up with strangers, or a part-time michetonneuse, an easy lay?
For a time her domestic life—sharing a room with Momone and Cécelle—was a safeguard. But before the locals could decide what to make of her, an event occurred that drove Edith to accept a more traditional form of protection. P’tit Louis showed up now and then, attempting to lure her back to Belleville. One morning when she and Momone returned from Lulu’s, the hotel-keeper announced that her “husband” had come during the night and taken their baby. He left a message—if she wanted Cécelle, she must come home. She declined to do so but sent Louis money to pay for their daughter’s care. “Edith never spoke of him again,” Berteaut wrote. “We missed [Cécelle] at first. We didn’t say so to each other, but there was an emptiness”—an emptiness that would haunt Piaf for the rest of her life.
The chronology of these events is unclear, but the void caused by the loss of Cécelle was partly filled by the man who became Edith’s protector. (Piaf called this milieu big shot Albert in her memoirs; the locals used his gang name, Ali-Baba; Berteaut identified him as Henri Valette.) Their liaison, which may have predated Cécelle’s departure from her life, perhaps explains why Edith did not go back to Belleville for her. And at eighteen she could not have understood that she was being drawn into a closed world, with its own codes and expectations.
Edith’s life at the Régence blended imperceptibly into a situation from which it would have been almost impossible to escape. The hotel adjoined a tavern called Au Clair de la Lune, whose regulars—men like Valette, addicts, and homosexuals—made her their mascot. After Momone left (the details of their separation are not known), Edith spent her spare time at the tavern, where an orchestra played until 3 a.m. and Valette, flanked by his crony “Tarzan,” presided over deals—mostly based on the earnings of their women. They dismissed la nouvelle as too scrawny; Valette changed his mind once she fell for his dodgy charm. When he said that she would have to work for him, Edith replied that working the streets her own way, she would earn the sums he required.
Her protector gave her a grudging respect and made her his accomplice. “I had to look out for dance halls where there were well-dressed women wearing necklaces and rings,” Piaf recalled. Valette then showed up at these places in his best suit. “Since he was very good-looking and full of confidence,” she continued, “he always succeeded in seducing his partner.” These evenings ended in the alley, where he snatched the woman’s jewels while Edith waited at a café. Later, she saw that her role gave him a hold over her: “It was the rule in the milieu. Men and women had to be compromised to keep them from escaping from the clutches of the crooks.” Piaf’s account is supported by the recollections of those who watched her struggle with the milieu’s mores.
At some point, when still besotted with Valette, she started singing at the Petit Jardin dance hall after the manager, who had heard her in the street, asked her to perform. On her first evening, the bandleader, the Gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt, said that although his new pianist didn’t know French, he, a “Kraut” named Glanzberg, would do his best to keep up with her. Her powerful voice made an impression, Glanzberg recalled, but he dismissed her as no more than an untrained street singer.
The Petit Jardin was a promotion from Lulu’s. The dance hall served as the milieu’s headquarters and a meeting place for young thieves hoping to impress the bosses who planned deals there while awaiting the return of their protégées—but also for bourgeois who liked to go slumming. Accompanied by her friend Jo Privat, Edith sang lyrics that could have been written for the Petit Jardin’s audience—like “Le Barbeau de Saint-Jean,” a woman’s lament for her lover: “Il ne m’aime plus, ni moi non plus / C’est du passé, n’en parlons plus.” (“He doesn’t love me anymore, I don’t love him either / It’s a thing of the past, let’s not talk about it anymore.”) The patrons “had a soft spot for her,” the writer Auguste le Breton, observed: “She knew how to project the songs that got under their skin, the songs inspired by these violent streets.… She gave off the odor of the street, of poverty, hunger, suicide.” Hookers wiped their eyes when she sang; pimps greeted her when she came offstage.
One night le Breton, then an eighteen-year-old, went to the Petit Jardin bar—where Edith was drinking wine. “Her shoes were down at the heel, but her shapely legs were sheathed in silk stockings, a jarring note given the rest of her.” A hoodlum was amusing himself by getting her drunk. When the youth allowed that he would do better to buy her a meal, they began to fight. Le Breton pulled out a knife, his adversary brandished a gun, a milieu chief told the youth to take the singer elsewhere. “I left with the woman who would become the great Piaf, who, like myself, didn’t even have decent shoes. We devoured ham sandwiches and beers at the Place Clichy.”
Like le Breton, the Clair de Lune staff wondered why Edith accepted the codes of Pigalle. “It was a mystery to us,” the bartender said, “why, for the sake of love, she would submit to a life full of disillusionment.” (He did not reflect that her life with her father had predisposed her to having a boss who took her earnings and dictated her behavior.) Of her friendship with a young waiter, a country boy who was the butt of the local gang’s taunts, the bartender recalled, “They understood each other’s humiliation.” One day Edith told Tarzan to leave the waiter alone. From then on the young man tried to help her, but on confronting Tarzan for his loutish ways with women, received a beating. Edith warned him, “Around here the strongest one always gets the last word.”
Years later, Piaf recalled the “life-saving shock” she received when her friend Nadia drowned herself. Nadia’s protector, who was one of Valette’s henchmen, had threatened to beat her if she didn’t work the streets. Nadia came to Edith in tears. She had tried to oblige but failed to entice any customers. A few days later, Nadia’s body was found in the Seine. “I realized just how low I’d sunk,” Piaf said. “That was the day when I decided … to escape from the milieu, to climb out of the depths on my own.” (Though she spoke openly of the fate of female prostitutes, she did not mention the equally dangerous homosexual trade that flourished at the Clair de la Lune.)
Piaf’s account of her attempts to leave Valette ring true even though they suggest scenes from a film noir. When he showed up at the Clair de la Lune after Nadia’s death, Edith said that she did not want to see him again. A few days later, his cronies took her to his room. He could kill her, she told him, but she had made up her mind. To her amazement, “the tough guy threw himself on the bed and wept” and she “took the opportunity to disappear.” But the story did not end there. Summoned to a café by her lover, she found him and his henchmen waiting. They threatened to shoot her unless she obeyed; she dared them to go ahead. A bystander deflected the shot; the bullet grazed her neck; Valette’s honor was satisfied.
Edith became adept at being seen to honor the local codes of behavior while doing as she pleased. “I had a desperate, alm
ost morbid, need to be loved,” she reflected near the end of her life. Perhaps to convince herself that she was lovable after her experience with Valette, she took up with three men at the same time: “I acccomplished miracles to see all of them.” But her memoir minimizes the reason for her feeling “ugly, wretched, all but unlovable”—the lasting hurt caused by her mother’s abandonment of her, which would be revived by Line’s reappearance in Edith’s life just as she was making a name for herself in their shared profession.
Edith chose different stage names for different venues. She performed at La Coupole, Le Sirocco, Le Tourbillon (where she also swept the floor), and at a dance hall near the Place de la République where the great Damia went to hear the woman described as “a tiny little dame” singing the songs for which the older star had become famous. No longer calling herself “Miss Edith,” she was by turns Denise Jay, Huguette Hélia, and Tania. Between engagements, Edith went back to singing in the streets, which may explain how Line, who also lived in Pigalle, learned that her daughter had joined her there.
It would have been heartbreaking to run into her mother in these circumstances. Line sang at low dives whose customers ignored her; she was paid in glasses of wine. When not performing, she eked out a living selling herbs in the markets. Once she knew how to find Edith, Line turned up at her hotel to ask for money. Edith gave her what she could, although her earnings were unpredictable and she had to pay the woman who looked after Cécelle while Louis worked. The Clair de la Lune’s bartender watched Line play on Edith’s need for love: “When she tried to reason with her mother, they quarreled and her mother hurled curses.… To calm her, her daughter would get another glass of wine, which didn’t help. Then the mother would start crying and complaining. Matters only got worse.”
No Regrets Page 5