Over the next two years, Norbert Glanzberg’s career improved dramatically. His association with Piaf led to other engagements, with singers like Charles Trenet and the Corsican crooner Tino Rossi, but at the same time, the zone nono became more dangerous. Once the Vichy government excluded Jews from most professions, Glanzberg’s name could no longer appear on programs. He became Pierre Minet, relying on a fake French passport obtained through Rossi’s network, though his German accent was likely to betray him at any moment.
Edith’s concern for her clandestine lover is evident in the nickname she gave him—“Nono chéri” or “darling Nono”—and in her correspondence. “I’m worried about you,” she wrote him during a separation. “I drink only water and tea, go to bed at midnight, and sleep all night long. Everyone says I look well. It must be love!” Moreover, she was improving as a singer thanks to his high standards. Aware of the increased risk for Jews in Marseille, where the Germans conducted daily searches, she arranged for Glanzberg to take shelter nearby, on a farm that belonged to her secretary, Andrée Bigard, known as Dédée—whose family did their utmost to help Edith’s Jewish friends (at her request, they would also shelter the young film director Marcel Blistène).
When Glanzberg’s hiding place became too dangerous, Piaf prevailed on a new friend, the Countess Pastré, to hide him at Montredon, her château near the lonely calanques (coves) on the coast near Marseille. Lily Pastré was a music lover who maintained good relations with the authorities, some of whom attended concerts at her château. What they did not know was that, at various times, the countess sheltered some forty Jewish composers and musicians as part of a secret artistic network. Delighted to learn that Glanzberg was classically trained, she took him under her wing, along with the superb classical pianist Clara Haskil, whose failing vision she saved by organizing a clandestine operation in the château’s basement. Piaf came when she could; visitors heard her rehearsing upstairs in one of the Pastré children’s bedrooms.
But even at Montredon, one had to be careful. Every morning Glanzberg left to hide in the cove where the countess left provisions, unaware that Edith was paying for his protection (Lily had to obtain ration cards and supplies for each new boarder). In November, when the Germans invaded the south, he fled to Nice under the protection of Rossi’s Corsicans. Edith continued to pay for his support, often sending Dédée to look into his welfare while also helping other Jewish friends.
That year Edith wrote a song whose title, “Le Vagabond,” hints at thoughts of escape from the grimness of life under the occupation. “J’ai l’air comm’ ça d’un’ fille de rien / Mais je suis un’ personn’ très bien,” it began. “Je suis princesse d’un château / Où tout est clair, où tout est beau.” (“I may look like a poor girl / But I’m really someone / A princess in her château / Where all is clear, all is beau.”) The princess thinks of her troubadour lover and of joining him on the road: “Et c’est mon coeur qu’il écoute / Notre amour dans le vent / Nous sommes vagabonds / Nous chantons nos chansons.” (“He hears my heart / Our love is in the wind / Vagabonds / We sing our songs.”) A dream of freedom in hazardous times, its vision improved upon the reality of childhood travels with her father.
“Whatever people say or imply about her,” Dédée Bigard wrote of this time, when she became Piaf’s confidante as well as her secretary, “she was a woman of great purity.” And, it should be said, one whose support of friends created ties that would outlive their years of angst and vagabondage.
CHAPTER SEVEN
1942–1944
While Edith toured the zone libre the summer of 1942, conditions worsened in the north, especially for Jews. Since May they had been made to wear a yellow six-pointed star with the word Juif stitched in black letters. Newspapers ran campaigns on the “Jewish peril.” An exhibition presenting Jews as cheats, criminals, and sexual deviants drew thousands of Parisians before its successful tour of the country. People whispered about raids, but few knew of the Nazis’ plans to arrest some thirty thousand Parisian Jews until two days after Bastille Day, when the combined forces of the gendarmerie, the mobile guard, and the police herded their victims to the Drancy internment camp, northeast of Paris.
By then, although some non-Jews wore yellow stars in protest, most Parisians were more concerned with food shortages, power cuts, and the difficulty of getting anywhere because of minimal public transport. To supplement the diet obtainable with ration coupons, those who could afford it turned to the black market for butter, eggs, and cheese. Marie Claire told readers how to stay healthy by balancing menus, assuming they could find the ingredients, and offered “easy recipes for difficult times”—a substitute for wine made of pea pods, a soup composed of nettles. Riding a bicycle would keep one fit, the magazine explained, and since it was impossible to get stockings, backs of legs could be painted with a dark line.
“Edith Piaf is coming back to us,” headlines announced in October. Her reappearance in the capital after more than a year’s absence was the singer’s way of showing solidarity with her fellow citizens. When she and Dédée stepped off the train, “all of Paris was waiting at the station,” she wrote to Glanzberg. “It was wonderful!” she continued. “I had to give a press conference at lunch, as if I were a princess!” She could not admit that he failed to return her affection, but her dream of love had come true on a different scale, with her overjoyed reception by the adoring crowd.
The press treated Piaf’s opening night as the event of the season. She came onstage with renewed self-assurance for her reunion with the public that had been awaiting her. After a few standards from prewar days, she sang all new songs, including Emer’s “Le Disque usé”—a risky choice in that it ended with Edith’s imitating a broken record, but even more so because the composer was Jewish. (What was more, its heroine, another poor girl waiting for her lover, maintained a proud, haughty stance—“fière et hautaine”—that could be taken as a kind of resistance.) The program also featured Edith’s compositions, including “Je ne veux plus laver la vaisselle” and “Le Vagabond,” whose dream of escape inspired rapturous applause. She took a greater risk by performing “Où sont-ils mes petits copains?” with the stage lit in blue, white, and red—the colors of the French flag. The next day, she was summoned to the Propaganda Staffel and told to replace the lights with a neutral spot.
Journalists treated Piaf’s A.B.C. engagement as her homecoming. The very genre of song had returned, a critic noted, “in the person of the one who created it.” Piaf’s was “the best tour de chant since Yvette Guilbert, Damia, and Yvonne George,” another wrote—and one that eschewed the current vogue for talky introductions and other forms of “trickery.” She simply came onstage and sang “straight from the heart.”
Similarly, Paris-Midi praised the star’s ability to imbue old material with a new nobility—“a purity of intention, breadth, and sobriety.” The A.B.C. program showed “her perfect command of the ‘Piaf style,’ ” now more moving than ever. One wonders what Edith made of the “Piaf style,” whether she laughed at the idea or took it as a tribute to her professionalism. “She no longer looks like a child,” another critic wrote. Her program showed “an intelligence that no longer owes everything to ‘nature,’ that from now on knows exactly what it wants.” At a time when singers rarely wrote their own songs, Piaf’s creative zeal was exceptional. Yet few understood the extent to which the maturity evident in her programming had been shaped by her collaboration with her composers—Asso, Monnot, and Glanzberg, who was still in hiding in the zone libre.
Edith soon concocted an unlikely plan for her Nono—to bring him back to Paris, where he could hide in Monnot’s apartment. In November, when the Germans occupied all of France, she told him, “I’m terribly afraid after what’s happened. I can’t come because I can’t get a laissez-passer.… I beg of you, don’t make mistakes that could have dire consequences.” He was her “seul amour,” she assured him, but, as Glanzberg knew, “seul” was an elastic term in her voca
bulary. What he did not know was that she had resumed her affair with Contet.
Buoyed by her success at the A.B.C., and with fourteen of her own songs in her portfolio, Piaf applied to the SACEM for professional status as a lyricist but failed the test—a composition on a set theme, “the train station.” Contet tried to make up for this setback by writing the lyrics for “C’était une histoire d’amour,” a slow, swingy tune that declared his affections. Admitting that love stories like theirs were not likely to last, the song ended on a resigned note: “Il faut toujours que quelqu’un pleure / Pour faire une histoire d’amour.” (“Someone always has to cry / To make a love story.”) Piaf recorded the song with a male singer echoing her acceptance of this proverbial sentiment at the end. Over the next few years, Contet would write a number of songs that gave a more complex dimension to the “Piaf style.” Because his lyrics explored their stories’ undercurrents, they were more ambiguous than the réaliste classics with which she was identified, and for this reason did not always find favor with the critics.
When Piaf’s A.B.C. engagement ended in November, her next concern was to arrange for housing. Contet loved her but would not leave his wife; Piaf could not bear to be alone. Her decision to rent an apartment near the Place de l’Etoile where discreet afternoon visits could be arranged offered a solution that was not without charm, since it was on the third floor of a high-class brothel. The proprietor, Madame Billy, was on excellent terms with the occupiers. In addition to being well supplied with food and drink, her establishment had heat, a luxury in the harsh winter of 1942–43. Life there would reinvent the conviviality of Maman Tine’s on a grand scale.
Piaf invited Momone, who resurfaced whenever the star was alone, to join her. Momone introduced herself to Madam Billy as Piaf’s “guide fish,” but the madam formed the opinion that she was “more of a piranha”—an impression confirmed when Momone stole five pairs of her alligator pumps to sell in Pigalle. Momone and the madam maintained a wary truce once the two friends moved in; Billy was relieved when Dédée Bigard joined them. Edith’s well-brought-up young secretary—“the anti-Momone”—was a good influence, the madam thought, gently showing Edith how to behave.
Since Billy’s kitchen served meals at all hours, Edith often had lunch there—nearly always the same dish, steak covered with garlic. She drank little except for peppermint sodas and spent much of her time practicing at the grand piano in the salon. When neighbors complained about after-hours concerts, the German patrol knocked on the door but backed down on hearing the singer’s name. “They all knew her,” Billy recalled, and they often stood outside to listen. “Edith didn’t give a damn about the Germans, … or about the risks we ran.” As an entertainer, she had a pass that let her come and go freely; one of her fans, a Lieutenant Weber, told her to phone if there was any trouble.
Most afternoons, Marguerite Monnot arrived on her motorbike to work with Edith. The composer seemed oblivious to their surroundings except to note that the building was warm. Although she often showed up the day after appointments, Guite would come immediately when Edith phoned at 3 a.m. and stay at the piano until dawn. Once, she turned up on a new motorbike, fretting that it was someone else’s, but when told to return it to where she had found it, said she had no idea where that was. She wasn’t absentminded, she explained, just thinking about other things. Guite understood Edith perfectly: both women dreamed of finding the passionate romance celebrated in their songs.
Piaf spent her whole life yearning for a great love, Contet mused years later. Once she concluded that he was stringing her along, Edith took another lover—the young man named Yvon Jeanclaude who had sung backup on “C’était une histoire d’amour.” Contet learned that he had a rival when he arrived at Madame Billy’s one afternoon to find that Edith could not receive him. He turned the situation into a wry song entitled “Le Brun et le blond”: depicting himself as the blond with a dark-haired rival for the same woman’s affections, he gave the blond man the last word, the note he leaves when he decides that he has had enough. (In performance, Piaf raised one hand to her eye to signify tears, an economical but effective gesture.) She added the song to her repertoire along with Contet’s darkly poetic “Coup de grisou,” the tale of a coal miner’s failed romance, and “Monsieur Saint-Pierre,” a saucy prayer to heaven’s gatekeeper.
Edith became Contet’s muse and mentor in spite of their amorous ups and downs. He should not think of imitating Asso, she counseled; since his light touch did not suit the dark mood of réaliste song, he should follow his instincts. Pleased with the subtle direction his songs were taking, she was inspired to write several of her own, including two bittersweet glances at old amours, “J’ai qu’à l’regarder” and “C’était si bon”—a jazzy fox-trot that ends on an affirmative note with Piaf’s rising glissando on a single word to her man—“oui.” Yet at times Contet’s domestic commitments enraged her. One freezing day during the Christmas season, when he remained at his own home, Edith took off her clothes and stood on the balcony, supposedly to punish herself for sleeping with a married man.
Even so, Contet kept writing for his tumultuous muse, often with Monnot setting his lyrics in the kind of close collaboration that Edith enjoyed with members of her artistic family. Contet would continue to write for her long after the end of their affair. “We writers, what were we after all?” he said years later. “Our words stammered and stuttered; she turned them into cries and prayers.” Though she was often tyrannical with collaborators, Edith was always inspiring: “Her enthusiasm compensated for all the rest.… You ended up writing what she wanted.”
Piaf considered Contet a modern-day Ronsard, but she liked to distinguish between her two favorite lyricists. Emer wrote songs that spoke to the people; Contet gave her more subtle texts with refrains that one could hold on to. She sang works by both men during her engagement at the Folies Belleville in January 1943. Comoedia’s critic, who followed her career closely, found Emer’s “De l’autre côté de la rue” and Contet’s “Le Brun et le blond” rather difficult for audiences accustomed to more direct fare, though in his view these two songs opened her repertoire to “nuances of feeling … with mysterious, almost magical, notes.”
From the censors’ perspective, Piaf’s show the following month at the Casino de Paris was only too direct. The manager illustrated her songs by projecting images onto a screen behind her and sending dancers with oversized accordions onstage as she sang Emer’s “L’Accordéoniste.” Though the critics did not complain about these changes in her normally minimalist staging, the Propaganda Staffel made strong objections to her singing songs by a Jewish composer. When Piaf refused to remove Emer’s work from the program, she was banned from singing until April. In the interim, Suzy Solidor, who was on good terms with the occupiers, took her place. Lieutenant Weber could not help. Piaf was persona non grata.
Though Piaf’s habitual gaiety was not in evidence during her five weeks of enforced rest, Madame Billy did her best to humor her. Given her experience of all types, Billy got on well with everyone except for Momone. Something of a snob, the madam preferred Edith’s well-known guests, Jean Cocteau and his lover Jean Marais, and the actors Michel Simon, Marie Bell, and Mary Marquet, of the Comédie-Française. In turn, these prewar celebrities were amused by Billy’s trade in what was commonly called “horizontal collaboration.”
While at Madame Billy’s, Piaf hired a Vietnamese chef named Chang to cook for her entourage. “What marvelous evenings we spent with her,” Billy recalled. “Her own happiness consisted in pleasing others.” On some nights she sang for her guests or recited the classic French poems she had learned by heart. She charmed Mary Marquet by claiming that poems were songs without music; the actress encouraged her to read Edmond Rostand’s popular plays, L’Aiglon and Cyrano de Bergerac. Edith’s home became a refuge where her friends could forget the Occupation.
Yet she was still unsure of herself, Billy thought, because of her background and because she had been
insufficiently loved. She flirted with attractive men to prove to herself that she could be seductive. “She was very unstable; she could be remarkably kind or really unbearable.” Edith’s friendship with Cocteau was the exception to this unsteadiness, Billy believed. Their love was platonic, yet profound: “A real passion united these two beings.” The madame studied their mutual absorption whenever Cocteau came to dinner. Afterward, as he read his poems aloud, Edith’s face softened: “She became the good little girl who was keen to learn and understand.” If she asked him to explain obscure words or images, “he did so patiently, translating the thoughts behind the words, making clear the sense of the images.” Often, as Edith recited his poems, she became radiant: “She was as beautiful then as when she sang.”
Cocteau considered Piaf a genius in her own right. He hoped to cast her in a film opposite Jean Marais—in his view, she had more charisma than any professional actress—and wrote her another dramatic monologue, Le Fantôme de Marseille. The singer’s purity of spirit was apparent as soon as she came onstage, Cocteau observed: “She transcends herself, her songs, the music, and the words.… It’s no longer Madame Edith Piaf who sings: it’s the rain falling, the wind sighing, the moon spreading her mantle of light.”
Friends saw that they thrived in each other’s company. Their affinity was based on deep trust and affection, but also on a shared obliviousness to possessions or money, which both acquired and spent almost absentmindedly. When the poet celebrated his birthday at his tiny Palais Royal apartment, he asked only “his closest intimates”—Jean Marais, Jean Giono, Maurice Rostand, and Edith.
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