By then, Piaf was singing again, after being forced by the censors to remove “L’Accordéoniste” from her repertoire. For much of the spring of 1943, she did double duty, performing first at the Casino de Paris, then at the prophetically named La Vie en Rose cabaret. That summer, she sang at both the A.B.C. and the Bobino, with different programs for each venue. Although she and Contet were seeing less of each other, she featured his songs along with Emer’s “Le Disque usé”—which somehow escaped the censors’ notice.
Some critics welcomed these changes while warning her against too much art: “You have skillfully renewed your old repertoire with Henri Contet’s reveries,” one of them wrote. “From ‘Mon Légionnaire’ to ‘Monsieur Saint-Pierre’ it’s a straight line but one that leads to the clouds. You’ve let yourself be captivated by the magic of the words.” Others hailed her performance as miraculous. Paris-Midi’s reviewer planned to “keep going to see this extraordinary interpreter of all human sorrows, hear her huge voice with its immense accents, look into her eyes, which reflect all the pain in the world and the … genius that animates her.”
With Piaf’s rise to fame, journalists began digging up any gossip they could find about her. In May 1942, when Edith’s mother had a gig in Pigalle, La Semaine published photos of both women under the headline “Line Marsa Sings with the Same Voice and Gestures as Her Daughter.” Having been abandoned by her second husband, the article explained, the older woman sang in the streets “like her daughter” until “La Môme Piaf, now famous, came to her aid.” What it did not say was that Edith had been sending her mother a monthly allowance for years. Nor did it mention that Line was a drug addict.
Since 1940, when Line spent some months in a home for destitute old people (when she was forty-five), Edith had been responding to her pleas for funds, as well as hard-to-find items like sugar, jam, chocolate, and cigarettes, with the help of Dédée. Line got in touch in May 1943 to beg for an increase in her allowance. In July, back in jail on drug charges, she had her lawyer ask Edith to pay her legal fees; she also needed clothes for her court appearance in August. Line thanked her “petite Didou” for additional support when she was sentenced to six months in prison and signed her note, “Tender feelings from your mother.”
For the next year and a half, Line would be in and out of jail. Some evenings she turned up drunk at Edith’s stage door. One day, when the police came to Madame Billy’s to tell Piaf that her mother was again in prison, the singer flew into a rage, shouting that she didn’t give a damn. Billy prepared another package of supplies as Edith, “more upset than indifferent, pretended not to notice.” When Line got out of jail, she asked for the right to sing her daughter’s songs. Dédée sent her off with sheet music and pocket money, “enough for several doses,” Billy noted.
Line continued to disturb her daughter’s home life. One night, when Cocteau and their friends were listening to Edith sing, strains of “Mon Légionnaire” performed just as she did echoed from the street—it was Line, stationed beneath her window. A new friend of Edith’s, a model named Manouche, recalled that, despite Edith’s objections, Cocteau tossed her mother a banknote—which Line pretended to use as toilet paper. “Every morning for two weeks she was out there, crowing until one of us threw her some money to shut her up.”
As Line awaited her court appearance in the summer of 1943, interviewers prodded Edith about her new persona. Asked why she no longer sang her prewar songs, she protested, “I’m not a chanteuse réaliste!” Although a creator of “popular songs,” she disdained the vulgarity of her old repertoire, its streets full of “tough guys in caps and prostitutes.” The public no longer wanted to hear about the milieu, she said. “Now you must write refrains that touch the hearts of those who hear them, errand boys, workers, salesgirls, men and women who are pure enough to be moved by love stories.” The public always embraced such songs: “The heart … is still the healthiest part of us.”
This artistic manifesto was picked up by a journalist who put her remarks in the context of the Occupation. The French had been deprived of everything, he wrote—most recently, green vegetables—“but they could still dream and shape their dreams as they liked.” At such a time, music was a kind of covert resistance, as shown by the recent success of a nostalgic waltz entitled “Ah! le petit vin blanc” that looked back to the joys of working-class life and forward to a German-free future. Asked to elaborate on her dislike for the réaliste genre, Piaf replied that it belonged to another time. She wanted to put the past behind her, to let her imagination and those of her listeners rise beyond the constraints of everyday life. (And also, perhaps, to distance herself from the mother who still sang these “vulgar” refrains when at liberty to do so.)
In contrast to her knotted feelings for Line, Edith’s affection for her father never wavered. Once she commanded high wages, she added to Louis’s monthly stipend the services of a houseman, whom the aging acrobat liked to call his valet de chambre. Though marked by a lifetime of acrobatics and gros rouge, Louis dressed well in the clothes his daughter bought him and told amusing stories about his exploits: “Groomed and coiffed by Edith, he looked like an ex-pimp,” Contet noted. She often visited Louis at his apartment in Belleville, where her reputation as a local who had made good enhanced his reputation. Her father came to see her several times a week, Madame Billy recalled, but never stayed to lunch: “He didn’t seem to feel at home.”
The aging acrobat surely saw that his daughter had formed a new kind of family, whose members were related through artistic affinities. That Edith was esteemed by Cocteau placed her in an unfamiliar social world. (The poet called her Madame Piaf to show his respect; though Edith often gave intimates nicknames, such as Riri and Dédée, she addressed him as Jean.) What was more, her reserved young secretary was setting a good example. Without seeming to criticize her rambunctious employer, Dédée often told her, “Mademoiselle, that just isn’t done. This is what you do in such circumstances,” Billy noted. “At first, Edith did whatever she felt like, but in time, one saw that the lessons had hit home”—though her high spirits never left her.
Dédée’s tutelage had a greater effect on the singer than Madame Billy realized. A number of loosely organized resistance groups had begun to sabotage the Germans by whatever means possible—attacking railways, power lines, and the sinister black automobiles in which the Gestapo patrolled the streets. Workers rioted when forced by the occupiers to leave France to become “volunteers” in German factories; by 1942, the Compulsory Labor Service (Service de Travail Obligatoire, or STO) had produced thousands of réfractaires—the term for those who refused to comply with the Führer’s plans for occupied populations to support the war effort. Clandestine groups of the refractory, or, as they were soon called, la Résistance, operated throughout France at great risk to their lives.
When Dédée joined one of these networks, she hesitated to tell Edith, not wanting to compromise her, but also because she was unsure how Edith would cope with the information. Soon, “with her remarkable intuition, she guessed that I was plotting something,” Bigard recalled. “She became a highly effective partner and got us out of difficult situations by making use of her vivacity and notoriety.”
Starting in August 1943, Edith turned an invitation to entertain French soldiers imprisoned in Germany into a way to help Dédée carry out a mission. Singers were told that their visits would improve the prisoners’ morale; most knew that to accept the offer—the kind one could hardly refuse—meant being seen to compromise with the enemy. Maurice Chevalier, who initially supported the Vichy regime, agreed to perform at the German prison camp where he had been held during the Great War on the understanding that ten prisoners from Menilmontant and Belleville would be freed following his visit. When his actions were misrepresented by the Free French broadcasts from overseas, which condemned him as a traitor, he retired to private life.
Even so, Piaf agreed to tour Germany for seven weeks with Charles Trenet, Fred Adison’s ban
d, and Dédée. A few days before their trip, she spoke with a journalist about her plans. She would perform new songs for the soldiers, she said. Asked whether they might not prefer older ones, she said, “I don’t think it would be helpful to stir up old memories.… What I hope is that when they listen to me they’ll think less about the life they left behind and more about the one they’ll find again one day”—a coded way of saying “once the war is over.”
The newspapers documented the tour with photos of Edith sharing conditions at the stalags—grooming herself alfresco, having her shoes mended by the camp shoemaker, sitting with a group of emaciated men. She was also seen visiting Berlin, where the first person she met was from Belleville, but there was no record of her many photographs with the prisoners, taken as souvenirs of her visit. On her return to Paris in October, Piaf told a reporter that the prisoners were “top-notch,” then, as she was hustled away by the press, shouted the stalags’ watchword, “Solidarité.”
Edith’s morale got a boost in January 1944, when she again applied to the SACEM for recognition as a lyricist and this time passed the test. The set theme, “My song is my life,” could have been chosen for her. Confirming her new status, Paris-Midi published her lyrics: “Ma chanson, c’est ma vie, / Et parfois, le bon Dieu / Y met sa fantaisie / A grand coup de ciel bleu.” (“My song is my life / And sometimes, the Divine / From out of the blue / Makes use of mine.”) Though the article does not mention Germany, she was already planning her next trip there. Dédée’s Resistance group was preparing false identity cards made with the enlarged faces from her souvenir photos; Edith was to distribute them, along with supplies to help the prisoners escape.
Before leaving, she gave the interview that told her cover story. The singer had received numerous letters from her pals in the stalags, she explained, as well as visits from their mothers and sweethearts, urging her to return. She knew about the Allied bombardments, but what mattered to her were the prisoners. Accompanied by her orchestra, a humorist, a dancer, and an actor named Robert Dalban, Edith and Dédée left for Berlin in February with the fake identity cards concealed in their suitcases.
It was snowing when they arrived. Their hotel lacked both heat and food; it was hard to find much to laugh about. Returning to her room with a bag of apples after going out for food, Edith exclaimed, “It’s all I could find in this shitty country!” As Dalban set upon the apples, she produced a roast chicken—the sort of joke she liked to play even in desperate situations. An ominous summons to meet Goebbels, head of Nazi propaganda, turned out well when Piaf’s party, including Bigard and Dalban, were received instead by a General Wechter, Goebbels having been called away. The general said that, as the head censor in Paris, he had been at the A.B.C. on the night when Piaf nearly caused a riot by singing “Le Fanion de la légion.” “We adored that song,” he said; “still, given the public’s reaction, we had to remove it from your program.” He gave Edith his card and said he would do anything he could to help.
Edith’s troupe visited eleven stalags but had to cancel their tour of the smallest, near Nuremberg, when the Allies stepped up bombardments. She compensated for this missed opportunity by singing at another camp, even though no transportation was available. “Edith, the pianist, and I walked through the snow,” Bigard recalled. “She couldn’t keep going, she was exhausted, we had to make a chair with our arms to carry her.” General Wechter himself could not have saved her if he had learned that she was distributing identity cards, maps, and compasses. Sometimes the escaped prisoners caught up with her tour and were passed off as musicians. After officials at one camp became suspicious and told Piaf to leave, she feigned illness to gain time so that those who were to join them would not be caught. “We were too fearful to try this again,” Bigard wrote: “the plan had become too dangerous.” She added, “[Piaf] was exceptionally brave.”
When they returned to Paris on March 5, Edith learned that her father had died two days earlier. He was barely sixty-three. On March 8, she attended the funeral service at the Church of Saint-Jean-Baptiste in Belleville, the occasion for a rapprochement with her half sister, Denise, their brother, Herbert, and her aunts from Falaise, the former acrobats, who represented the family at their brother’s last rites.
On March 31, she told Glanzberg, who was in hiding near Toulouse, that she had been unable to write until then because of her father’s death. “I loved him very much.… It’s terrifying to come suddenly face to face with what you cannot change.” Things were bad in Paris, worse than people imagined. “I hope this abomination will come to an end soon,” she continued. Only the thought of the songs that he was writing for her gave her any pleasure.
Throughout the spring, while performing at benefits for bombing victims and families whose breadwinners were doing forced labor in Germany, Edith continued to mourn her father. “She wasn’t up to getting together with the family to talk about our loss,” Denise reflected, “but she often went to the cemetery to put a bunch of violets on Papa’s grave.”
Denise had turned thirteen on the day of Louis Gassion’s funeral. When Edith learned that he had been looking forward to Denise’s first communion in May, she took Denise to Au Printemps, the department store, to buy her the traditional outfit—a white coat and dress, white shoes, and a gold cross. But on the day itself, too full of grief for her father, she could not bring herself to attend the ceremony.
CHAPTER EIGHT
1944–1946
Throughout the spring of 1944, as Allied bombers hammered the German war machine, French workers were shipped in increasing numbers to toil in German factories. Many of those who went underground to avoid the STO joined the network of Resistance groups operating under threat of discovery by the Gestapo. Despite the widespread sense that the Germans were losing the war, they still had the upper hand in Paris, where it was a struggle to survive each day. Many Parisians sought distraction at the theaters and cabarets. As the Gestapo rounded up Jews in increasing numbers, Parisians began to notice non-Jewish names on the hostage lists, which were bordered in black.
Edith alternated between nightclub engagements and benefits for bombing victims, STO workers, and the families of prisoners in Germany—including Stalag III-D, for whom she served as unofficial godmother. (Her black dress may have seemed doubly appropriate as she continued to grieve for her father.) Late that spring, she moved to an apartment near the Champs-Elysées—a less compromising address than Madame Billy’s. With the Allied invasion the topic on everyone’s lips, an apartment that could not be linked to collaboration with the Germans made sense. “We said goodbye as friends,” Madame Billy wrote. “She wasn’t easy to live with, but a star of her order has the right to behave as she likes.”
During the first week of June, as the Allies prepared for D-Day, Edith sang nightly at the Moulin de la Galette, in Montmartre. On June 5, the five hundred spectators crowded into the converted mill turned their attention to the tiny singer on the bare stage. Normally boisterous patrons became as silent as if they were in church while she chanted Contet’s “Y’a pas de printemps”—whose vision of a future full of springtimes was understood as a reply to the dark present. Piaf surpassed herself with Contet’s other new tunes, “Les Deux Rengaines” (the song’s two rhythms, one sad, the other gay, alternate like contrary views of life) and “C’est toujours la même histoire,” a classic love story. She gave the audience “powerful emotions,” a critic wrote, “at once solid and diaphanous.… Her heart-wrenching voice, its metallic tones, her reserved yet mobile face and eloquent hands have never been so powerful.”
This paean to Piaf’s mastery appeared just as news of the Normandy beachheads reached Paris. Her response was not recorded. Perhaps she was too busy to think beyond her next engagement. (Some years later, she would be asked to sing at the launch of the D-Day film The Longest Day, as if hers were the voice of France’s liberation.)
In July, the director of the Moulin Rouge signed Edith to re-open the cabaret, which had been fun
ctioning as a cinema. Though she had already heard of Yves Montand, the young man from Marseille who was to audition for second billing, she did not think much of his repertoire—which was inspired by the pro-American sentiment that swept France with the invasion. On the day of his audition she changed her mind: “His personality was terrific.… His hands were eloquent, powerful; his face handsome and tormented, his voice deep and, miraculously, with little trace of the Marseille accent.” Montand needed just one thing—songs to replace his “impossible cowboy refrains.” His recent success would evaporate unless he found something more profound to say than “yippee-yi-yay.”
Edith agreed to hire Montand and find him better material. Within the week, she also became his lover, a situation that replayed while reversing her relations with Asso. At twenty-three, Montand was starting what would become a major career; at twenty-eight, Piaf was already famous. The young man was touched by her loneliness. “I had fallen in love without even knowing it,” Montand said much later. “She was fresh, flirtatious, both funny and cruel, passionately devoted to her profession, ambitious, a shopgirl on the town, loyal when she loved, … one of those people who made you feel that you were God, that you were irreplaceable.” But in her role as mentor, she could also be a tyrant.
Piaf talked Contet into writing music for her new costar—which put the lyricist in the position of unwittingly helping his rival at a time when he and Piaf were still intimate. (She invited Contet to meet Montand, but it took the older man months to understand the basis of their rapport.) One night, when Contet called Edith with the lyrics for “Ma Gosse,” which he had written for Chevalier, she convinced him to save it for Montand: its breezy mood suited his persona. Even though this comical situation worked to Montand’s advantage, Dédée let Contet know that Edith would drop Yves as soon as Henri decided to leave his wife.
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