No Regrets

by Carolyn Burke

  On December 18, the day before her twentieth birthday, Edith made her first record with Canetti, at the Polydor recording studio. For her debut he chose “L’Etranger” (no longer under exclusive contract), “Les Mômes de la cloche,” and two songs in parigot slang that evoked the cheeky atmosphere of the bals-musettes (the sort of song that foreign audiences rarely heard once Piaf became famous, because of their argot and lack of fit with her “tragedienne” persona). “She was relaxed and full of fun” at the studio, Canetti observed: “she felt at ease and understood immediately what needed to be done.”

  The same month, she performed in a film version of Victor Margueritte’s scandalous novel La Garçonne, about a middle-class woman who forsakes an arranged marriage to experience life in Pigalle—where she frequents lesbian bars like Lulu’s, the occasion for Edith’s cameo role. Dressed in satin evening pajamas and surrounded by female admirers, Edith crooned “Quand même,” a sultry apologia for vice: “Le bonheur quotidien / Vraiment ne me dit rien / La vertu n’est que faiblesse / Qui voit sa fin dans le ciel / Je préfère la promesse / Des paradis artificiels.” (“I don’t give a damn / For ordinary joys / Weakly the virtuous ones / See their end in heaven / I prefer the promise / Of artificial paradise.”) A provocative part in a film with stars like Marie Bell, Arletty, and Suzy Solidor meant that Edith was on her way.

  In the meantime, she was happy to go on singing at le Gerny’s, which gave her an income and a loving relationship with Papa Leplée, her name for her protector. They confided in each other about the recent deaths of her daughter and his mother; they found emotional strength on visits to the Thiais Cemetery, where both were buried.

  On a more practical note, the critics’ observations about La Môme’s stage clothes prompted Leplée to take her shopping at the couturier Tout Main, where they ordered a simple black dress, the style she would wear throughout her professional life. When he sent her back to publishers in search of new songs, this time their positive response led to her recording eight more numbers for Polydor, including another celebration of the underclass entitled “Les Hiboux,” and “Fais-moi valser,” whose lyrics implore the woman’s lover to grant her one last waltz before leaving forever.

  Leplée worried about Edith’s carousing with the lowlife types who waited for her at the stage door and accompanied her to Pigalle, where she treated them to whatever they wanted. (Since nightclubs had to pay tribute money, he no doubt knew that she too was under the milieu’s protection.) If, as Berteaut writes, Leplée shared Edith’s attraction to sailors, legionnaires, and apprentice hoodlums, he also knew that such associations, however stimulating, would not further his plans for her future.

  One wonders how much she told him about having been turned over by Henri Valette to her new lover, Jeannot, the ex-sailor with whom she shared a room. He was a patient man who put up with Edith’s whims—including her insistence on buying him pointy-toed patent-leather shoes that looked stylish but were a size too small. “He was a simple, honest fellow,” a friend recalled. “He loved her for her own sake.” Another of her lovers, a jealous thug named René whom she rejected in favor of Jeannot, followed her for years and may have exacted protection money. He was, Piaf wrote, “incapable of forgiving or forgetting.”

  Knowing the code of the milieu, Leplée had reason to be concerned about La Môme’s safety, although he paid less attention to his own. The impresario often befriended the better-looking hoodlums who turned up at the club. He offered Jeannot a tuxedo so he could come to le Gerny’s, but Edith’s lover said that he preferred his blue-and-white-striped top and sailor cap. “She had difficulty attuning herself to this new world in which she found herself,” a friend observed, “but she kept on trying even when it seemed impossible.”

  At Edith’s first gala appearance—a charitable event at the Cirque Medrano on February 17, 1936—it must have seemed as if she were fulfilling her father’s dream of appearing there. The evening, a benefit for the widow of a famous clown, brought together well-known actors, athletes, and circus performers. The little singer was thrilled to see her name on the program in letters the same size as those of her “comrades” Maurice Chevalier, Mistinguett, Fernandel, and Marie Dubas. She and Leplée formed an odd couple, “he, very tall and elegant in his well-cut evening clothes, and me, very small, very ‘Belleville-Ménilmontant’ in my sweater and knitted skirt.” After her performance, Leplée declared, “You’re a tiny thing, but you’ll be fine in the greatest locales.”

  Her next booking, he announced on April 5, would take them to Cannes for a charity ball to benefit street urchins—an occasion that no doubt seemed appropriate. Yet, while he looked forward to showing her the Riviera, he felt a sense of foreboding—having been unsettled by a bad dream. Edith tried to talk him out of his dejection. She promised to go to bed early that night to be fresh for a radio broadcast the next day but ignored his advice and after her performance at the club made the rounds of Pigalle.

  Edith was startled to hear a new voice when she phoned Leplée in the morning to change the time of their appointment. She must come to his apartment immediately, the man said, using the formal vous rather than the familiar tu with which Leplée adressed her. On hearing her name, the policeman who let her into the building followed her upstairs. The door was open. Leplée had been shot through the eye; he was dead. Decades later, Piaf recalled the shock: “How can I describe the feeling of total emptiness, of unreality, that left me senseless, unable to move or respond to a world that had gone to pieces in a second?”

  Suddenly she was a suspect in a murder case. The police interviewed everyone from le Gerny’s, starting with her. They questioned her for two days about her background, her relationship with Leplée, her ties to the petty criminals of Pigalle. Under pressure, she reluctantly gave the names of her lovers, including Valette and Jeannot, but kept insisting that she knew nothing. The police verified her alibi and let her go. But she was to keep them informed of her whereabouts.

  Following Edith’s release, the media refused to let her off the hook. Détective, a popular scandal sheet, ran photos of the grief-stricken singer at Leplée’s funeral, along with their analysis of the case. “The man in the street doesn’t know about Louis Leplée,” the journalist Marcel Montarron wrote, “but he does know about ‘La Môme Piaf,’ whose name and voice have already been heard on the airwaves.” Since the authorities had found nothing to implicate her, he guessed that blackmail, racketeering, or a combination of the two had motivated the murder, given the “special nature” of Leplée’s preferences.

  What Détective did not say was that, three years earlier, Leplée’s friend Oscar Dufrenne had been brutally murdered at the Palace, the music-hall in Pigalle where Leplée had run the club. The murderer, identified as one of the men posing as sailors who picked up clients like Dufrenne and Leplée, was never found. When Leplée met the same fate, the police investigated Piaf’s entourage but were unable to find a lead, despite Leplée’s housekeeper’s description of the four young men who entered his apartment the night of the murder, tied her up, and accosted her employer. The men, presumably known to the victim, must have expected a handsome payment, the journalist suggested, but when the weapon they brought to scare him went off accidentally, a case of blackmail turned into a murder.

  La Môme Piaf remained in the headlines while the investigation dragged on. The four men were never found. The newsreel Éclair-Journal tracked her down in its attempt to sensationalize the affair. Despite her stylish gloves and fur collar, Edith looked terrified. Asked why she had given her friends’ names to the police, she replied, “I had to say who I’d been with or they’d have thought I was protecting someone.” When the interviewer questioned her about how well she had known Leplée, she sobbed, “My friends are gone. I have no one. Leave me alone.”

  Edith pulled herself together some days later for an interview with Montarron for another popular magazine, Voilà. Having become interested in her when researching his piece for D�
�tective, he planned to do a human-interest story—one that would show readers that, though she came from Belleville, she was not one of the immoral creatures she sang about. “La Môme Piaf” appeared in Voilà on April 18, with photos of sparrows and of the little singer, her dark dress adorned with a white bow at the neck—an ironic touch, given the cigarette in her mouth.

  Edith trusted Montarron enough to invite him to her hotel room and introduce her “petit homme”—Jeannot—stretched out on the bed in his sailor’s blues. When the journalist took the couple to a restaurant in view of Sacré-Coeur, it reminded her of singing there with Cécelle in her arms. “She died eight months to the day before Monsieur Leplée was killed,” Edith said, as if their deaths were linked in her mind, or as if she was already adept in giving the press the kind of stories they wanted. They did not discuss the case, except to tell the story of her discovery by the impresario. Leplée was still protecting her, Edith added; he had asked friends to look after her in case anything happened to him. Club owners were approaching her because of her notoriety. Everyone wanted an “artiste à sensation.”

  That night, she began singing at Chez O’Dett, on the Place Pigalle, where the young producer Bruno Coquatrix had booked her for two months. (Coquatrix lent her the money for a new black dress with sleeves, to cover her scrawny arms, and with pockets, to hide her hands.) O’Dett’s was a comedown from le Gerny’s, where she had earned more than twice as much per night. The main attraction, a drag show, drew customers from the artistic world and the homosexual elite, who were usually sympathetic. But when Edith came onstage, she faced hostile stares. “I might as well have been singing psalms,” she said. “I wonder if they’d have noticed the difference. They hadn’t come to hear a singer; they’d come to see ‘the woman in the Leplée affair.’ ”

  One night, an older man stood up to lecture a member of the audience who had greeted her songs with disapproving whistles. Not only was it unfair to judge someone whose innocence had been proved, he said, but it was bad taste to whistle in a cabaret: “If she’s good, applaud, and keep your nose out of her private life.” The audience began to clap; “then, as he joined in, the applause was for me,” Piaf recalled. Hoping to put Pigalle behind her, she did not renew her contract at O’Dett’s.

  Edith’s resolve to concentrate on her career may have been strengthened by the absence of Momone that spring. The police had picked up Edith’s “evil spirit” after Leplée’s murder and, on learning her age, sent her to a school for wayward girls. Without her accomplice (Berteaut said that, as Piaf’s “demon,” she deliberately encouraged her vices), Edith turned to her few remaining friends—Robert Juel, Jacques Bourgeat, and Jacques Canetti.

  Juel continued to accompany her on the accordion while also acting as her bodyguard, a service that must have been reassuring when she sang at another Pigalle venue, the Ange Rouge—a particularly dangerous club, thanks to the presence of the Corsican mafia. “Jacquot” Bourgeat helped her find peace of mind by having her read the classics of philosophy, though it is hard to see how she could assimilate Plato in such volatile circumstances. Bourgeat, who loved her gaiety, enjoyed playing the role of Edith’s professor: “She was attentive, a good student, but mainly she wanted to listen.”

  It was Canetti who allowed Edith to imagine a new life by having her record songs that would make her a bankable asset. In May, accompanied by a full orchestra, she cut four new tunes for Polydor. Although the violins bothered her at first, she adjusted to the new sound. Around this time, she met the composer Raymond Asso, whose lyrics for one of these songs, “Mon Amant de la Coloniale,” evoked an affair between a man in the French colonial army and the woman he leaves behind—taking advantage of the vogue for love-’em-and-leave-’em tough guys. Also through Canetti, Edith joined a traveling company called La Jeune Chanson 1936, which performed at Paris music-halls in May and June, then made its own tour de France during the summer.

  While the Jeune Chanson troupe traveled around the country, French workers were enjoying their first state-sanctioned paid holidays, a Popular Front innovation that helped fill the theaters. But such revolutionary measures (the Blum government also agreed to salary increases, shop representatives, and collective bargaining) made no impression on the young singer, judging by her memoirs. “She never even thought about changing the world,” Piaf’s most reliable French biographers observe. “Her desire was to seduce it, to conquer it, and, more precisely, to escape from the one from which she came.”

  In August, Edith wrote to Bourgeat from Lausanne, where the troupe was performing at the Maison du Peuple. Having had to replace her lost identity card, she had in the process understood that she needed to put her life in order. “I’m no longer with Jeannot, or Georges, or Marcel, or Jacques,” she told him. “I’ve decided to be serious and work hard to please my dear old Papa Leplée.” She hoped to disentangle her life from the milieu: “I’m completely disgusted by all that. I’m going to keep my dough for myself.” Promising to learn good French (the letter is full of mistakes), she swore “on Monsieur Leplée’s ashes” to reconnect with her father, who could take charge of her, and, for company, with Momone. To close this eighteen-page screed, she called Jacquot her “wildflower,” doodled a sparrow with an envelope in its beak, and signed it “didi.” (In the bulk of their correspondence, she is his “Piafou.”)

  Edith found it impossible to keep her promises when Momone was released and joined her in Pigalle. The singer went back to O’Dett’s, despite the pay, since she had both of them to support. In September, she had engagements at two of the better music-halls, the Alhambra and the Trianon, and in October, through Fernand Lumbroso, an associate of Canetti’s, at the Broadway Theater in Brussels. She no doubt performed the tunes she had recorded that spring, Asso’s “Mon Amant de le Coloniale” and “Il n’est pas distingué,” sung in the persona of a streetwise accordionist called “Zidor” (a nickname for “Isidore”?), whose dislike of the current German leader turns this comic number into satire: “Moi, Hitler, j’l’ai dans le blair / Et j’peux pas le renifler.” (“I can’t stand Hitler / He gets up my nose.”)

  But Edith was less concerned with the mounting European crisis than with making her way. In November, Lumbroso booked her and Momone, her presenter, for a week in Brest. Edith was to open at a theater before the main attraction, a film entitled Lucrezia Borgia, a historical drama, which, however well acted, was unlikely to attract the town’s most vocal residents, the sailors quartered there. Momone called Brest “an impossible dump” except for the sailors—“you had as many as you needed.” Their presence at the theater, where they defended Edith by picking fights with other members of the audience, and the singer’s nightly carousing prompted the manager to take action. After he rang her producer, an angry Lumbroso summoned her back to Paris.

  Earlier that year, Edith had sought out Asso, who had made an impression on her when they met at a music publisher’s. After playing Asso’s latest song, “Mon Légionnaire,” the pianist introduced her to the lyricist, a tall, thin man with a big nose and an edgy manner. Though Edith said that this song did not suit her, Asso watched as she sang another of his compositions: he was moved to tears. Later that year, when Marie Dubas’s recording of “Mon Légionnaire” became a hit (the song consecrates the 1930s myth of the Foreign Legion), Edith felt as if Dubas had stolen what was hers. The lyrics seemed to echo her adventures with men in uniform.

  That year, she and Asso often crossed paths in Pigalle. He thought that he could write for her but noted her lack of discipline: “She was a wild thing, … unwilling to accept any limits on her freedom.” Edith had turned to him when afraid that life was closing in on her, and one night, after the murder of Leplée, took refuge in his hotel room. She trusted the lyricist but would not comply with his demand that she lead a more orderly life and break with Momone, the “devilish girl … who followed her around like her shadow.”

  In December, Lumbroso gave Edith one last chance, a booking in Ni
ce, at the basement club of Maxim’s Restaurant. On the train to the Riviera, she shared her third-class compartment with a young man who held her hand while she dozed on his shoulder. At Marseille, two detectives handcuffed the man and, to Edith’s distress, hauled him off the train.

  Berteaut, who joined her in Nice, recalled their stay as a continuous party, including drinking contests with the American sailors in port. Edith’s memories are more somber: “My situation wasn’t great.… Not having much money is annoying but it’s not a disaster. Losing your taste for life is far worse, and I was almost there. With the death of Leplée, I lost everything, the guidance that I so badly needed and, above all, an affectionate, irreplaceable friend.” She was on the Riviera at last but under circumstances very different from those she had imagined with Leplée. To celebrate her twenty-first birthday, she and Momone downed a bottle of wine.

  “I’ve been doing a lot of stupid things,” Edith wrote Asso from Nice. She asked whether he would send her his new songs; he said that he would not think of it unless she changed her way of life. The day after her return to Paris, in January 1937, she phoned him in desperation. She would have to return to the streets unless he took charge of her, she said; Asso replied that he had been waiting for this opportunity for over a year. “Take a taxi and come right over,” he added. To Piaf, his response marked a turning point. Years later, she said of this moment, “I was saved.”