No Regrets

by Carolyn Burke

  Still other doors opened for her. One evening Madame Raoul Breton, the wife of Piaf’s music publisher, asked her to dinner to meet Jean Cocteau, at his request. The “prince of poets,” who often sought new energy in popular art, was as entranced with Edith as she was with him. By the end of the meal they were addressing each other with the intimate tu. A friendship began that evening that would last the rest of their lives.

  Piaf was a being of “regal simplicity,” Cocteau wrote. On first hearing her, he was stunned “by the power emanating from that minuscule body,” and by her eyes, “the eyes of a blind person struck by a miracle, the eyes of a clairvoyant.” Edith was flattered to have the leader of the artistic avant-garde enamored of her; she admired his elegance, his erudition, his wide-ranging artistic gifts. That winter, Cocteau often visited Piaf and Meurisse after their gigs at the cabaret. The poet was “at the summit of art and intelligence,” Meurisse wrote. “To know him was to enter the realm of magic.” Since Cocteau equaled Molière in Piaf’s opinion, she asked him to write a song for her, as she had done with Bourgeat: surely men of learning who wrote poetry would also be good at songwriting.

  Cocteau would instead produce a one-act play for two actors based on Piaf’s relations with Meurisse, whose icy calm suggested the title, Le Bel Indifférent. Originally conceived as a chanson parlée (a “spoken song”), the play is a monologue directed at a “handsome, indifferent man” by the lover he ignores—Piaf’s role. “A magnificent gigolo on the verge of no longer being so,” he reads his newspaper while she becomes increasingly desperate because of his lack of response. When she promises to do everything he wants, he walks out, slamming the door.

  After befriending the couple, Cocteau rewrote an earlier draft of the play, one of his many dramatic works on the theme of unrequited love, to take advantage of Piaf’s reputation. He made the female character a cabaret singer in a little black dress and called for a realistic set, a hotel room of the sort she had inhabited in Pigalle. Her persona inspired the playwright to realize his “dream theater,” he wrote—“a play that disappears behind the actress, … who seems to improvise her role each night.” At first Edith was unsure how to hold the audience for the thirty minutes it took to declaim her monologue. But, though the role was a challenge, Cocteau was delighted: “She executed it with the ease of acrobats who exchange their trapezes in midair.” The play opened on April 20. “Mademoiselle Piaf is excellent!” Marianne exclaimed. “Her acting is both passionate and precise,” Le Figaro noted. Piaf was “magnificent,” according to Les Nouvelles littéraires, whose critic could not resist saying that she came by her tragic air naturally.

  Meurisse did not record his feelings about playing opposite his lover, except to say that not speaking for half an hour made him tense. His habitual sangfroid was further tested when he was mobilized after only six performances, and Piaf declared that he was better at acting than at singing.

  Le Bel Indifférent ran until May 14 with another actor in the male role. By then the Germans had occupied the Low Countries, and northern France was under assault. Following a Red Cross benefit at the Bobino and a return engagement there, Edith left for two weeks in Provence while Hitler’s troops marched on the capital. Soon a million Parisians were fleeing before their advance. She returned to Paris on June 12—two days before the victorious Germans hung a huge swastika from the Arc de Triomphe and marched in formation down the Champs-Elysées.

  After the fall of Paris, all places of entertainment closed. Following the announcement of the armistice on June 17, France was divided into Occupied and Unoccupied zones, with three-fifths of the country under German rule and a pro-German regime in Vichy. Those who could leave Paris did so as soon as possible.

  Edith made her way to Toulouse, where Meurisse was stationed. Finding her old friend Jacques Canetti among the horde of refugees, she asked him to find her a gig. Hotel rooms cost a fortune; she needed cash. Soon she was sharing the stage at a movie house with her lover. For the next two months Meurisse accompanied her on a tour of southern France, the first of the many tours of the zone libre (Unoccupied Zone) that Piaf would make during the Occupation. It took them to Perpignan (where they ran into Cocteau), Montpellier, Toulon, Nîmes, Béziers, and Narbonne. By September, she had had enough of touring. Refusing to be intimidated, she declared to her lover, “Krauts or no Krauts, the capital of France is Paris.”

  They arrived in Paris on September 17 to find most public buildings draped with swastikas. From their lunch table at Fouquet’s, they watched a German officer on horseback lead a company of soldiers to the Place de la Concorde. “It was a terrible shock,” Meurisse recalled. “We pretended to be indifferent, but although we already knew that we had lost, we understood at this very moment that with defeat comes humiliation.”

  It became apparent that Paris was now on German time—one hour earlier than in the past. The next day, when the couple began rehearsing for a joint engagement at L’Aiglon, they learned that all programs had to be submitted to the Propaganda Staffel (censor). To maintain an air of normality, the cabarets, cinemas, and theaters had been reopened by the occupiers, who were astounded by the the Paris audiences’ defiant chic—their way of showing that their spirits would not be cowed.

  “At this time, the occupiers had clean hands,” Meurisse wrote. “We would soon see the arrival of the other sort.” In this context, Piaf’s songs evoked prewar Paris, Aujourd’hui observed: “the sharp wind blowing round the corners of poorly lit streets, … the touching images of her rhymes, tales from despairing penny novels.” Her girl-of-the-streets persona helped audiences reimagine the city that had, until recently, been theirs.

  Piaf’s official return, a gala at the Salle Pleyel, took place later in September. More nervous about appearing at this prestigious theater than about the Germans, she felt “excessively fearful,” she explained: “Standing there for an hour in my schoolgirl’s mourning dress … trying, without artifice, interlude, or trickery—with only sixteen popular songs—to please all those strangers who came just for me, seemed such a hopeless task, one at which I was so likely to fail, that before going onstage, I told myself that the organizer was crazy.” Once onstage, she went into a trance; the hour passed quickly. She ended with “Le Fanion de la légion,” its vision of the besieged garrison that holds out against the enemy stirring thoughts that France too would one day “cry victory.” The audience gave her a standing ovation.

  “Edith Piaf has more astonishments in store,” Paris-Soir wrote of this concert. “She possesses the best quality an artist can have—sincerity.” This tribute from a newspaper with strong collaborationist leanings may have made her feel that she need not worry about the censors.

  For the rest of the year, Piaf performed without incident at L’Aiglon, the A.B.C., and the Folies Belleville—until December 6, opening night of the A.B.C.’s winter revue. Edith went onstage after a singer whose servile attack on the English, intended to please the German officers present, unsettled the audience. She began with “Le Fanion.” The audience held their breath as she evoked the legionnaires’ defiance of “les salopards” (“the bastards”); when she turned to face the Germans, the crowd erupted in condemnatory whistles—the song’s iconic flag again stirring thoughts of victory over the swastika. The next day, the Kommandantur ordered her to remove “Le Fanion” from her repertoire.

  All forms of cultural expression were now being vetted by the Germans. Giving in to the pressure for self-censorship, the Society of Authors, Composers, and Editors of Music (SACEM), which handled song rights, blocked disbursals to Jewish composers even before the Germans could tell them to do so. Works by Jewish songwriters were also verboten on the radio. Three of Piaf’s songs were prohibited: “Mon Légionnaire” and “Le Fanion” for their references to a unit of the French army, and “L’Accordéoniste” because its author was Jewish. (By then Emer had gone into hiding.) When Edith’s friend Pierre Hiégel, the popular radio host, accidentally played her 1936 satir
e “Il n’est pas distingué,” listeners were stunned to hear her intone, “I can’t stand Hitler.” The censors took note but did nothing.

  Though Piaf detested the occupiers, she had to go on singing—to earn her keep, and because she could not do otherwise. “On the one hand,” her friend Henri Contet explained, “she felt an instinctive hatred of the Krauts.… On the other, she was hardly bothered by the Occupation.” Her loathing for the Germans kept her from making the compromises that would call other singers’ careers into question; she was relatively undisturbed, because the occupiers meant to maintain the appearance of normality by distracting the French with uncontroversial entertainment.

  At the same time, the situation changed dramatically for Jewish Parisians. Starting in the autumn of 1940, the Germans issued a series of decrees defining Jewish identity and ordering all Jews to register at the Préfecture de Police. Overnight, Jewish shops were marked with signs indicating their owners’ origins; soon many business and cultural activities, ranging from banking to attendance at the Conservatory of Music, were verboten for Jews.

  Through the spring of 1941, Edith kept busy with appearances in Paris and the provinces. Feeling the need to refresh her repertoire, she missed her composers, who either had been called up or were seeking refuge in the Unoccupied Zone. Among the songs she recorded in May, the passionately felt “Où sont-ils mes petits copains?” was unusual because it spoke of war’s impact on friendship, but even more so because Piaf penned the lyrics and had them set to military music by Monnot: “Où sont-ils tous mes copains / Qui sont partis un matin / Faire la guerre? / Où sont-ils tous mes p’tits gars / Qui chantaient, ‘On en r’viendra / Faut pas s’en faire.’ ” (“Where are all my pals? / They left one morning / For the war / Where are all those dear guys / Who were singing, ‘We’ll be back / Don’t worry.’ ”) The missing copains—they hail from all over Paris—form the throng imagined in the final line, “Le voilà! Les voilà!,” an up-tempo vision of prewar life. By comparison, Piaf’s bluesy “J’ai dansé avec l’amour,” also set by Monnot, mimes a dancing couple’s embrace in its swaying rhythms—a song that could be aired on the radio without complaint from the censor.

  When the film director Georges Lacombe asked Edith to star in Montmartre-sur-Seine, about a flower girl who becomes a singer, the opportunity to perform her own songs onscreen proved irresistible. She and Monnot collaborated on the score, which includes “J’ai dansé avec l’amour,” and two romantic waltz tunes, “Un Coin tout bleu” and “Tu es partout.” Obtaining a role for Meurisse did not improve their deteriorating relationship. He criticized her interpretation of the heroine, Lily—who falls in love with her accompanist though he is enamored of someone else. When Meurisse said that she had made fish eyes in a love scene, Edith exploded. Their fight ended only after he sat on her and both burst out laughing.

  Another cast member, the young Jean-Louis Barrault (whose character admires Lily in vain), took a more favorable view: “Everything she did or sang touched the heart.” Edith could have been a fine actress, he thought: “She was extremely sensitive, which I understood since we both came from modest backgrounds.” Looking back, he admired her integrity, the way “she remained ‘Piaf’ for the rest of her days, following her infallible instinct.”

  Montmartre-sur-Seine summed up Piaf’s prewar life by capitalizing on her reputation as a street singer who beguiles audiences from all backgrounds, even those suffering from class resentments. In a nostalgic sequence filmed on a bridge over the Seine, she croons the lilting “Tu es partout” to the unresponsive hero (played by Henri Vidal); in the next scene, the scenario underscores the modesty of Lily’s (and Edith’s) background by having her peddle sheet music to the crowd in her titi-parisien accent. “Je ne veux plus laver la vaisselle,” another of her songs composed with Monnot, was omitted from the film because of its insubordinate tone, which was enhanced by Monnot’s rising lines and tempo: “Je ne veux plus vider les poubelles / Je veux qu’on m’appelle Mademoiselle.” (“I don’t want to empty the garbage / I want to be called Mademoiselle.”) Piaf’s lyrics, which read like a declaration of independence by a réaliste heroine, marked the start of her attempt to distance herself from that tradition’s emphasis on the squalid side of life, its misérabilisme.

  Henri Contet, then a journalist sent by Paris-Midi to visit the film set, failed to see how anyone could resist her. The pavement might be cardboard, he wrote, but “this false street set became real as soon as she sang.” (Paul Meurisse, on the other hand, seemed unemotional.) Contet pondered the film’s “complicated, tortuous” plot, the hero’s lack of interest in the singer. “But after all,” he concluded, “isn’t real life, the way we live it, often more complicated, difficult, and heartbreaking than the passions that are invented for us?”

  Contet, a handsome blond with an elegant air, was attracted to Piaf, who was still living with Meurisse. That autumn, he wrote several more articles about Montmartre-sur-Seine. In “Edith Piaf Weeps for Her Lost Love,” Contet’s narrative restages the scene when her impassive lover leaves her. “What to do,” he wrote with tongue in cheek, “console her? But how? I thought of all those songs to which the star gave her own tears, her immense heart, the admirable strength she can find in herself.” Half jest, half confession, Contet’s article impressed its subject. After reading his poems, she gave him a nickname, Riri, and asked him to write a song for her—the start of yet another complicated, difficult relationship. Montmartre-sur-Seine opened in Paris in November 1941. By then Piaf had begun another tour of the Unoccupied Zone, where life was freer despite the Vichy government’s attempts to enforce its credo, “Travail, Famille, Patrie.” The pro-Nazi newspaper Je suis partout declared that even though the film was untainted by the presence of Jewish artists, it nevertheless inflicted on audiences “that little person with cavernous eyes, a macabre big head tucked into her hunched shoulders.” Other pro-German mouthpieces described her in similarly anti-Semitic language. “Piaf should have stayed a working-class singer peddling songs on street corners,” Révolution nationale ranted. “Miraculously, she avoided such a fate thanks to the snobs who took her up.” But, having had the effrontery to show herself onscreen, she was now “the perfect incarnation of our decadent epoch.”

  If Edith had learned that she had become the personification of non-Aryan-ness, she would, no doubt, have burst out laughing—“that laugh that never left her,” Paul Meurisse observed, “even at the most tragic of times.” Her lover went with her to Lyon, the first stop on their joint tour: she was again accompanied by Norbert Glanzberg, the German pianist with whom she had worked while singing with Django Reinhardt in Pigalle. She and Meurisse performed at Toulon, Nîmes, and Marseille before his return to Paris for another engagement. Piaf was at loose ends, as was Glanzberg, but for different reasons.

  Having made his way to the zone nono (French slang for the zone non occupée) Glanzberg, who was Jewish, knew he had to watch his back—especially in a place like Marseille, where thousands of refugees awaited passage out of the country. In October, at the louche Café des Artistes, he had met the Corsicans who ran show business on the Riviera. One of them, the impresario Daniel Marouani, had hired him to accompany Piaf on her tour, starting in Lyon.

  Within a short time, Glanzberg joined her entourage—the musicians and handlers, driver, cook, and secretary who functioned as her court, and whose expenses she paid. At twenty-five, Edith commanded such high fees that she could fill her hotel rooms with flowers and treat friends to black-market items like champagne. Glanzberg remarked years later, “She knew that because of the way she abused her health for the sake of her career, she wouldn’t have much time to enjoy what she earned.” (He seemed unaware that she had never acquired bourgeois habits like putting away funds for one’s old age.)

  Piaf and her new pianist shared little but a love of music and a gift for survival. Glanzberg, a classically trained composer who became an accompanist and songwriter after fleeing to Paris, scorne
d French popular music and the cabarets of Pigalle, where he had earned his living in recent years. Once the SACEM blocked access to his French song rights, Edith became his lifeline. But in his opinion she did not measure up: a scrawny little thing who lacked good manners, she sang like a fishwife. (Her intelligence and sense of humor nonetheless impressed him.) Still, at each performance, when Glanzberg worried that his features would betray him, he gained strength from her presence: “When Edith leaned on the piano, the better to create that intimacy that bound her to the music, to her music, I was seized by a mysterious, enchanting power.” In those moments, he was sure that nothing bad would happen.

  Because Edith had a horror of being alone, her entourage was expected to stay up late with her. One night, when Glanzberg was preparing to leave, she dismissed the others and told him to stay since it was after the curfew. “What could I do? It was Edith Piaf or Adolf Hitler,” Glanzberg ungallantly told a journalist. He did not love her, but made the best of the situation—a little less than a love affair, a little more than a fling.

  Paul Meurisse, tipped off by a mutual acquaintance, was sufficiently upset by the news of their affair to come to Monte Carlo, where Edith was performing in March 1942. When he knocked on the door of her hotel room, it was “Ciel! Mon mari!” with the roles reversed. The next day, Meurisse assumed an outraged air without quite pulling it off, because his wife-to-be was waiting for him in Paris. Had he and Edith loved each other? “We were opposites,” he wrote. “I could easily believe that each of us wanted to astonish the other.” (About this time, Piaf astonished a local journalist named Léo Ferré: the singer was “without any question a tragedienne,” he wrote, “whose profoundly human art comes from the depths of her heart.” In 1945, when Piaf encouraged Ferré to become a songwriter, he moved to Paris. Within a few years, he had become known for his settings of French poetry, and by the 1950s, he was a noted composer and performer.)