No Regrets

by Carolyn Burke

  CHAPTER FIVE

  1937–1939

  If Leplée had fostered Edith’s talent by nurturing her self-confidence, Raymond Asso would become her Pygmalion—or, as some have said, her Svengali. Piaf believed that Asso taught her to be human. “It took him three years to cure me. Three years of patient affection to teach me that there was another world beyond that of prostitutes and pimps. Three years to cure me of Pigalle, of my chaotic childhood … to become a woman and a star instead of a phenomenon with a voice that people listened to as if being shown a rare animal at a fair.”

  In retrospect, Asso saw himself as Edith’s dompteur—the tamer who breaks a wild creature of its need to scratch and bite. Only when totally exhausted, he said, “could she submit to a dompteur’s authority.” She was an uncut diamond, he continued. His role had been “to facet her, which wasn’t always easy. Her scrappy street spirit often took over. If she hadn’t had that extraordinary desire to sing, to become good, I would never have succeeded.”

  The lyricist saw that his protégée had to be retrained. Edith sang as she had always done, her hands glued to her sides, her body stiff and unmoving, her few gestures awkward or repetitious. Worse, to Asso’s way of thinking, her accent was vulgar, and she was deaf to the lyrics: “Distorting the words, she deformed the most basic rhymes; she sang magnificently but without grasping the meaning.” With him she would learn to adapt her diction and phrasing to each song, and to build her career with the disciplined approach that the French call métier.

  Yet to say that Asso remade Piaf is to underestimate the singer’s role in her own transformation. Though she stood like a statue onstage, she was no Galatea, nor did she simply submit to his unlikely Svengali. Aware of what Asso had to offer, Edith sought him out when she was ready to work with him, then struggled to keep her independence while being retrained—like a Parisian Eliza Doolittle. After Piaf’s death, Asso reflected on his role, which had gone beyond teaching her to pronounce words properly: “My work was to offer moral and physical guidance to a little creature who—because she had lacked the tenderness I gave her and the trust I inspired in her—would never have been more than an odd little thing on her own.” Yet her talent was so great, he confessed, that anyone in his shoes would have done the same.

  Soon after Edith went to live with Asso at the Hôtel Piccadilly, the lyricist began severing her ties to the lowlife types whose influence got in the way of her career. Their hotel, just down the street from the Place Blanche, was too close to familiar haunts and temptations. In March 1937, they moved up the hillside to the Hôtel Alsina, a spot that encouraged a loftier perspective, which was especially useful once she returned to singing at O’Dett’s. Asso made a list of all those who were not to visit their refuge—chief among them, Momone and Louis Gassion, who came around whenever he was short of funds. (Momone found work in a Belleville grocery store and made a marriage of convenience; Louis waited each week for Asso to bring him his share of Edith’s earnings, his old-age pension.)

  Edith called her mentor Cyrano because of his sharp wit and beaky nose, but also because he wrote the kind of world-weary verse that she admired. Although the lanky ex-soldier was an improbable person to effect her transformation from street urchin into artist, Edith believed in him. She loved the luminous blue of his eyes, the sensitivity hidden beneath his swagger, his way of stroking her hair and crooning “ma petite fille” when their lessons exhausted her. He called her Didou, a nickname that suggests his almost paternal feelings for her.

  At thirty-five, Asso exuded an odd glamour. Like Edith, he had fended for himself since the age of fifteen. He had been a shepherd, a smuggler, a spahi (a native soldier in the French colonial army), a ghostwriter, and, lately, a lyricist whose songs had begun to be recognized. He often collaborated with the pianist Marguerite Monnot, who had composed the music for “Mon Légionnaire”; soon she and Edith also became friends. In 1937, Asso gave Edith two of his favorite songs, “Le Fanion de la légion” (“The Foreign Legion’s Pennant,” music by Monnot) and “Mon Légionnaire” for her next recording session—when the vogue for music with doomed romances in exotic settings was at its height. In time, Piaf came to believe that Asso had written “Mon Légionnaire” for her. The quintessential song of its era, this colonial fantasy portrayed a woman’s one-night stand with the soldier who leaves her to pursue his fate in the “hot sands” of the Sahara: “J’sais pas son nom, je n’sais rien d’lui, / Il m’a aimée toute la nuit, / Mon légionnaire! / Et me laissant à mon destin / Il est parti dans le matin / Plein de lumière.… / Mon légionnaire!” (“I don’t know his name, don’t know anything about him, / He made love to me all night, / My legionnaire! / Leaving me to my fate, / He went off / In the bright morning light.… / My legionnaire!”)

  Even though Asso’s “pocket tragedy” (Jean Cocteau’s phrase) seemed to evoke Edith’s past, it was also linked in her mind to the first person to record the song, Marie Dubas—whose successful career she hoped to emulate. But before Edith would be ready to sing in the music-halls like Dubas, Asso insisted, she had a great deal to learn. Her table manners had to improve if she was to feel comfortable in society; she had to dress as elegantly in daily life as she did onstage. Edith often rebelled when he showed her how to hold her knife or said to wait for the right moment rather than blurt out what was on her mind. Yet she knew instinctively that these essentials of savoir-vivre (good breeding) would help to shape her image—the “personality” that Asso kept talking about. Quarrels over such things as posture at the dinner table alternated with lessons in French poetry once Edith accepted him as her mentor, the man to complete the process she had begun with Jacques Bourgeat.

  Still, her relations with Asso were more fluid than the teacher-pupil model suggests. When Edith told him stories about her past, the lyricist took notes in order to use his protégée’s life as his sourcebook. Some have called Piaf his “creation,” but one can also see her as the muse who inspired many of his best songs. Their partnership confounds fixed ideas of muse and artist: they alternated in these roles with each other. Just as Edith enabled Asso to write lyrics that he would not have composed without her, so, with his support, she honed her craft to perform these songs on the larger cultural stage. Over the three years they lived and worked together, their contentious collaboration would nourish both partners’ creativity.

  In March, Asso took his protégée to watch Marie Dubas sing at the A.B.C., the city’s leading song palace. By the end of the set, Edith was dumbstruck; her eyes brimmed with tears. “Now do you understand what makes an artist great?” Asso asked. From then on, whenever she had a free evening, Edith went to the A.B.C. to study Dubas’s expressions, the way she shaped a song with gestures, her ability to provoke tears and laughter, the ease with which she modulated from one rhythm to another to reach an emotional climax. Above all it was the audience’s love for the star that moved her: “All these people, their faces full of expectation, formed one single heart together.… I too wanted the public to love me like that.”

  The A.B.C.’s location—down the hill from Pigalle, on the Boulevard Poissonière—gave it the respectability lacking in joints like O’Dett’s. The director, a canny Romanian named Mitty Goldin, had chosen the theater’s name so that it would come first in directory listings; by 1937, he was booking all the best-known performers—Dubas, Fréhel, Damia, Tino Rossi, Suzy Solidor, and Lucienne Boyer. Asso tried repeatedly to get Edith a booking there, but Goldin resisted. In his view, she was inexperienced and had a bad name because of the Leplée affair. Undeterred, Asso courted the impresario until he agreed to give her a chance—as one of the acts preceding Dubas, the main attraction.

  On March 26, her hair coiffed and her black dress enlivened by a white lace collar, Edith came onstage as an accordionist played her theme song, “Les Mômes de la cloche.” She was to close the first part of the program with five songs. To mark a contrast to the familiar tune that had introduced her, she launched into one of Asso’s c
ompositions, the bittersweet “Un Jeune Homme chantait” (the tale of a man who goes off singing after taking a young girl’s virginity). Next she sang a comic number and three more Asso songs: “C’est toi le plus fort” (a woman’s confession that she allows her lover to be “the stronger one”), “Browning” (a noirish tale of a Chicago-style hoodlum in which she gleefully rolled the “r” in the man’s name), and “Le Contrebandier” (a stirring tune that claims its smuggler hero as “a sort of poet”). When the audience refused to let her go until she sang “Mon Légionnaire,” Goldin re-raised the curtain. Edith kept coming back to take her bow; Asso declared victory.

  The critics agreed that La Môme was now a star. She had made “astonishing progress,” Le Figaro noted; when evoking the poorer districts, “she was quite simply remarkable.” More poetically, Paris-Soir wrote, “The frail street flower no longer wilts on the Parisian stage. Hav[ing] gained in strength and knowledgeability … she has become a very great success.” To the left-wing journalist Henri Jeanson, Edith’s was “the voice of revolt.” Listening to her rousing rendition of “Le Contrebandier,” he added, “I felt as if I were crossing the border under the nose of the authorities.”

  To Maurice Verne, a critic of popular culture and a friend of Fréhel’s, La Môme’s performance brought to mind Colette’s saucy prewar heroine Claudine. “Here is the miraculous resurrection of Claudine’s short hair, her white collar … her black dress resembling a schoolgirl’s uniform.” To suit her “metallic” voice, she needed songs written just for her to tell certain kinds of stories: “réaliste portraits of working-class life, gray with the soot of factory chimneys and abuzz with tunes picked up from bistrot radios.” Years later, Piaf recalled in her memoirs, “Asso wrote songs like this for me; direct, sincere, without literary pretensions … as welcoming as a handshake.”

  Despite her triumphant A.B.C. debut, Edith could not afford to rest on her laurels—particularly since Asso had accepted a low fee in order to get her a booking there. Starting on April 16, the day after her A.B.C. engagement ended, she sang at O’Dett’s and the Sirocco; then, in May, went on tour to Aix-les-Bains; Lille, Belgium; and, over the summer, eight French watering spots, where she performed in the casinos. After a month’s rest, she appeared in several of the large Parisian cinemas that featured live attractions before the film. Her September gig at the Belleville Cinéma would have brought back memories; in October, after falling ill during a gig in Le Havre, she would have recalled leaving her sickbed as a child to perform there. Asso arranged Edith’s bookings, planned her repertoire, and accompanied her on tour—the better to play his role as dompteur—but also because he loved her.

  For the next two years, Edith recorded only her lover’s compositions, showing the gratitude she felt toward the man who had “saved” her, though she was already chafing under his discipline. In 1937, she recorded three of Asso’s songs from her A.B.C. debut along with his latest ballad, “Paris-Méditerranée”—inspired by her tale of the man in the train on whose shoulder she had slept until the police took him away. Asso imagined their brief encounter from her perspective: “Dans une gare ensoleillée / L’inconnu sautait sur le quai. / Alors des hommes l’entourèrent / Et, tête basse, ils l’emmenèrent / Tandis que le train repartait.” (“In the sunlit station / The stranger jumped onto the platform. / Then some men surrounded him / And took him away, head hanging, / As the train took off.”) When the man raises his hands to bid her adieu, she sees the sun glinting off his handcuffs and hears the train’s piercing whistle in the background.

  That autumn, Edith took charge of details when she could, changing the words of a refrain when recording Asso’s songs or, in performance, finding the gestures for each of her numbers. By November, it must have been clear to him that his Didou had grown up. She was ready for her return engagement at the A.B.C., an event that would mark another turning point. At Asso’s insistence, Edith would no longer be billed as La Môme. On opening night the orchestra played “Les Mômes de la cloche”; then the mistress of ceremonies made an announcement: “La Môme is dead! You are about to hear Edith Piaf!” Wearing her beguiling black dress and white lace collar, Edith demonstrated her range by performing songs as different from each other as a saucy java in working-class slang, “Correqu’ et réguyer” (“Correct and Regular”), and the intense, patriotic “Fanion de la légion.”

  The critics were quick to applaud her name change and her repertoire. “The ‘môme’ was charming,” Le Journal wrote. “But Edith Piaf—and the general public’s triumphant welcome for every one of her songs—that’s something else. She’s an artist, a great artist.” Though rebaptized Mademoiselle, Edith had lost none of her fieriness onstage, another critic observed: “She seemed to be standing on a barricade, the better to hurl invectives against social injustice.” Carried away by his rhetoric, he continued, “She is, by turns, poverty-mistreated, a low whore rebelling against her condition, a convulsive kid clawing the police who grabbed hold of her.”

  After her final appearance at O’Dett’s in December, Edith celebrated Christmas 1937 by singing at the circus in Rouen. One wonders whether she found time to visit the Gassion household in nearby Bernay, or to tell her father about her circus gig after returning to Paris for a New Year’s Day radio broadcast. From then on, she kept busy with an almost uninterrupted round of radio programs, recordings, cinema appearances, and casino tours until her third engagement at the A.B.C., from April 15 to May 4, 1938.

  Now that Edith was a rising star, Goldin gave her second billing on the program, before his new attraction, the jazzy, lighthearted Charles Trenet. Surprised that the La Môme had turned into an artist, Comoedia’s critic praised “her perfect diction and air of knowing a great deal for her age.” He hoped she would stay true to herself as one “who belongs to the race of Fréhel.”

  Two days after her A.B.C. booking ended, Edith began an eight-week engagement at the Lune Rousse cabaret, which earned more enthusiastic praise. “Edith Piaf has worked very hard since her debut,” Roger Feral wrote; he hoped that she would not become too professional or lose her spontaneity. To Paul Granet, “her beautiful masklike face resembles the mask of Greek tragedy, but one that is animated and exalted, that reflects every emotion and passion moving through the soul of this highly sensitive artist.” In June, when she did double duty at the Européen music-hall, Louis Lévy confessed that, although he had formerly seen La Môme as “just a miniature girl of the streets,” he had changed his mind because of the singer’s sobriety and intelligence: “This time I was completely won over.”

  If one stops to measure the distance Edith had come since her discovery by Leplée, one realizes that it had been harder, not to say more unlikely, to make the transition from joints like O’Dett’s to the music-halls than to move from street singing to the cabarets. By working nearly nonstop for the past three years, she had won over the critics and the general public. In a sense, she came on the scene as the last chanteuse réaliste, when a predominantly female radio audience still preferred her fatalistic songs to upbeat musical trends influenced by American-style swing and jazz.

  Yet one can also see Piaf’s popularity in relation to a persistent myth celebrating the fringes of society—the crooks, pimps, whores, and other fallen women who were the dramatis personae of her music. Harking back to a familiar view of the past, her songs updated the tradition of urban poetry, a kind of popular epic in which misfortune must be endured—at least by its female characters, since its male ones, the soldiers, sailors, and other adventurers, all disappear, leaving their women to lament or, on occasion, shake their fists at Fate. Piaf’s way of seeming to rise above her hard-knock life may have been the reason that she was asked to sing at an anti-Franco rally that year, at the left-wing Palais de la Mutualité, on the Left Bank. Told to avoid songs that glorifed militarism, she belted out patriotic airs until the audience, composed mainly of pacifists, called out for everyone’s favorites, “Le Fanion de la légion” and “Mon Lég
ionnaire.”

  If Asso’s tragic legionnaire resonated in the popular imagination, the woman of easy virtue who gave herself to him was an equally evocative, and nostalgic, trope. Again inspired by Edith’s past, Asso gave this figure his full attention in his next song for her, “Elle fréquentait la rue Pigalle”—which harked back to the réaliste obsession with prostitutes: “Ell’ fréquentait la rue Pigalle, / Ell’ sentait l’vice à bon marché, / Elle était tout’ noire de péchés / Avec un pauvr’ visage tout pâle. / Pourtant y’avait dans l’fond d’ses yeux, / Comm’ quelqu’ chos’ de miraculeux / Qui semblait mettre un peu d’ciel bleu / Dans celui tout sale, de Pigalle.” (“She hung out on the rue Pigalle, / She smelled of cheap vice, / She was black with sin / With a poor pale face. / Yet there was something in her eyes / Like a miracle / That seemed to put a little blue / In the sooty sky of Pigalle.”)

  Asso’s tale of a whore with a heart of gold ends badly when the man who tries to free her from the trade abandons her. The woman re-affirms the status quo by returning to Pigalle—though the little singer who seemed to be the incarnation of this character was already attempting to flee from its streets. A historian notes, “Critics who acclaimed Piaf’s renewal of the repertory of French Song were hearing a new voice rather than new themes, a re-identification of the singer and the words.” In time, she would escape from Asso’s limited vision of her potential. But for the next eighteen months, Edith accepted her Cyrano’s benevolent tyranny.