Meanwhile, Edith forced Yves to take their shared profession as seriously as she did. Contet watched her put him through his paces. “Yves never argued with any of Edith’s orders,” the lyricist noted. “He must have gritted his teeth more than once … [and] told himself that the rewards of the exercise were greater than its torments.” Contet went along with her plan to boost Montand’s career by praising his Moulin Rouge act in Paris-Midi; Edith began writing songs that would present her protégé as a man of the people, the counterpart to her image as the street singer who made good. The tall, gangly southerner and the Parisian waif formed an endearing couple. With Piaf, a critic wrote, “Montand, who is beginning to forget cowboys and rolling plains, has found himself a new personality.”
On August 15, as news of the Allies’ gains in Normandy reached Paris, Yves and Edith toasted their advance with champagne. Within a few days, posters urging Paris to battle went up around the city; Montand joined the actors defending the Comédie-Française; as battles raged outside, the company intoned “La Marseillaise,” the French anthem having been banned during the Occupation. On August 25, as the liberation of Paris began, he and Edith watched General Leclerc’s tanks roll down the Champs-Elysées. They fell to the pavement when German snipers fired at the crowd, many of whom sported the French tricolor and the white armbands of the Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur (in slang, “les fifis”). The next day, Edith kept a fifi from hurling grenades at the retreating Germans: “Don’t be a fool!” she yelled. “They’re leaving.”
In September, the euphoric mood of the Liberation was still palpable. At the same time, purge panels were being set up to deal with collaborators. Many journalists, writers, and artists came under scrutiny as pro-German influencers of public opinion; some of the country’s best-known performers had been compromised by their participation in German-sponsored events. Even those who called themselves anti-Nazis worried as it became clear that the purge panels offered the opportunity to settle old scores. Mistinguett received a reprimand for singing on the German-controlled Radio Paris. Chevalier barely escaped execution by Résistance militants, despite his recent broadcasts of “Fleur de Paris,” a song that offered a vision of a united, post-Occupation France. Trenet was blacklisted for ten months, as was Suzy Solidor, despite her claim that her only offense was to have sung the old favorite “Lili Marlene.” Arletty served a prison term for “collaboration horizontale” with her German lover but was allowed out under guard to finish filming Les Enfants du paradis. (She is reported to have said, “My heart is French, but my ass is international.”)
There had been few actual collaborators in the entertainment world, but even fewer who actively supported the Resistance. When the purge panel published a list of names of those whose voices were banned from the radio, Edith’s was among them because of her trips to Germany. Called to testify before the panel in October, she said that, though she had been forced to take the first trip in order to keep on singing, she had taken the second one to give her earnings to the French prisoners along with the maps and identity cards that helped many of them escape; Andrée Bigard supported her testimony with details. After Piaf also gave the names of the Jewish friends whose shelter she had arranged and financed, the panel voted unanimously, “No sanction and congratulations.”
Performers like herself had been forced to comply with the occupiers’ demands, she told a reporter from Ce Soir. She knew about the rumors, “some of which were not well meaning,” surrounding her trips to Germany. Now that the panel had cleared her, she could explain her actions, since she had just learned that 118 prisoners had used their fake cards to escape. “I forced myself to navigate around the pitfalls of the Nazi propaganda machine to keep the trust of the French public,” she explained. In the photograph illustrating the article, Edith has a hangdog expression and wears a dark dress buttoned to her chin, as if mourning the losses of the past four years.
Edith had already left Paris when this interview appeared in October. After a series of benefits for war victims, she toured the south of France with Yves. His renditions of Contet’s songs—“Battling Joe,” an upbeat tune about a boxing hero; “Luna Park,” on a workingman’s holiday; and the lighthearted “Ma Gosse”—went over well except in Marseille, where the public wanted cowboy refrains. Piaf told him not to lose heart. Under her wing, he learned to identify “the songs you can’t drop, and to try out other titles as I went along, fine-tuning the ones that worked, monitoring those that didn’t work right away but might one day.” The newspapers were full of praise for Piaf but also for her protégé, “this tall handsome guy full of enthusiasm … who all by himself makes the stage look very small.”
In December, they performed for the American soldiers stationed in Marseille. While Edith paced backstage, Yves delighted the audience by dosing his patter with Yankee slang. He took her to meet his family, Italian immigrants who had settled in one of the “macaroni” neighborhoods of Marseille in the 1920s, when his name—not yet Gallicized—was Ivo Livi. The whole neighborhood greeted the couple; the Livis welcomed them with a festive meal.
Yves’s sister Lydia, who would become Edith’s intimate, observed the star’s response to their clan: “She was a little shaken by our noisy celebration and seemed surprised that we talked so much and so fast. But she was also attracted by our warm family spirit.” Edith chided Yves for complaining about the Livis. He was fortunate to have them. Having grown up without one, she had tried to create such a family in her entourage of musicians, songwriters, and staff. The Livis understood that she and Yves were now betrothed, their relationship sealed by the clan’s embrace.
If the couple’s brief stay in Marseille represented their unofficial engagement, the party Piaf gave on their return to Paris introduced her new partner to the press. A throng of journalists assembled at the Mayfair cabaret on January 15, 1945, where she announced her first star turn in Paris since the Liberation and their debut as a duo. They were to perform at the Etoile, the Empire-style theater on the Avenue Wagram, from February 9 to March 8. Over the next few weeks, they polished the repertoire they had developed on tour in the south.
Three days before the opening, Edith learned that her mother had died of an overdose. She was forty-nine. A newspaper account stated that her corpse was left on the sidewalk by the man with whom she lived, then taken to the morgue. Piaf asked for Contet’s help with arrangements for Line’s burial in the Thiais Cemetery, Cécelle’s resting place, but did not attend the funeral. Though she had sent Line an allowance each month and helped when she was in crisis, Edith claimed to feel little for the mother who reappeared in her life only to exploit her. Once the Gassion tomb that she had purchased at the Père-Lachaise Cemetery was completed, Edith would transfer her father’s and daughter’s remains there but leave her mother where she was.
Judging by photographs of Yves and Edith at this time, she was deeply in love with her new partner. In the euphoric early stages of their romance, she wrote several songs to refurbish his repertoire and expand his range. “Sophie,” a jazzy farewell to love, resembled any number of tunes that others had written for Edith (the eponymous Sophie loses her zest for life when her lover leaves her), but it gave Yves the chance to carry off a torch song. In a different vein, her witty lyrics for “Il fait des …” depict a pop-music fan who becomes “hystérique” when he hears “musique” but turns “mélancolique” if it is “classique.” She was having fun with the lyrics while giving him the chance to make the audience smile.
It no doubt pleased her to watch Montand perform “Elle a …,” another of her tender, teasing songs about a woman like herself. “Un petit bout de femme pas plus grand que ça,” it begins (“a little woman no bigger than that”), she was his “bouquet of laughs.” Rhyming “tourments” and “moment,” Piaf implied that love and its torments were both momentary. She would have smiled as her lover crooned her praises: “Elle a des rires / Pour me séduire,” a line linking seduction to laughter. By then she was su
fficiently comfortable in her dual role as lyricist and lover to let his uncertainty emerge in the refrain: “Elle a … / Des tas de choses / Des choses en rose / Rien que pour moi.… Enfin … je le crois.” (“She has … / All sorts of things / All of them rosy / Only for me.… / At least … I hope so.”)
For the time being, Montand was on top of the world. At twenty-three, he shared the billing at the Etoile Theater, whose elegant arcades and pink marble staircase must have made him feel that he had arrived. (L’Etoile, once a venue for light opera, featured concerts by well-known stars rather than variety shows.) As the first act, he was such a hit that Piaf had to work harder than usual to win back the audience, for whom her new songs by Contet—especially the one entitled “Mariage”—seemed too subtle.
“Don’t try to rise above yourself,” the critic Serge Weber scolded in an open letter to Piaf on February 15. People loved her because she was “simple and natural,” he claimed: they wanted songs to match, “with words that everyone understands.” (Weber’s gibe at Contet’s poetics came at a time when French musical life was marked by an intense desire to affirm the prewar values that had been suppressed under the Occupation.) Though other critics who taxed Piaf with being too intellectual also blamed Contet’s lyrics, L’Aurore disagreed: his songs suited her new persona. Ignoring the criticism, she would sing his lyrics (including some of her biggest hits, “Padam … padam” and “Bravo pour le clown”) for the rest of her life.
In March, Piaf and Montand performed at the Casino Montparnasse, where the predominantly working-class audiences applauded his repertoire so enthusiastically that rumors began to circulate about the protégé’s surpassing his mentor. When Piaf went on tour, Montand was not included, but she changed her mind at the last minute. The songs she wrote for him found favor in Marseille, especially “La Grande Cité,” a trenchant critique of workingmen’s lives in a city “Là où les hommes turbinent / Toute une vie sans s’arrêter” (“Where men slave away / All their lives without end”). Piaf’s pensive lyric, in the view of a local critic, was full of a “tristesse souriante” (“a smiling sadness”). But it was Montand’s new confidence that impressed viewers. “No longer a supporting act for Piaf’s program,” the critic continued, he had become “the equal, by the end of the first act, of what she is in the second.”
Piaf confessed to Contet and others that she often felt anxious about coming onstage after her costar. “When I toured with Yves,” she told one of them, “he scored triumph after triumph, and night after night I stoically bore my cross.” Even though Edith’s recording sessions for Polydor that spring may have reassured her, Yves cut his own first record for a rival firm. Show-business wags remarked on the aptness of his stage name: montant, its homonym, means “rising”—a fitting pun on his rapid rise to fame.
Despite her worries, Edith kept writing songs that would become her own triumphs. One day, when she was sitting with her friend Marianne Michel at a café on the Champs-Elysées, the young woman complained that she had nothing new to sing. Edith began scribbling words on the paper tablecloth, a tune that she had been thinking of for some time: “Quand il me prend dans ses bras, / Qu’il me parle tout bas / Je vois les choses en rose.” Her friend thought about the “choses en rose” (an echo from Piaf’s recent song for Montand, “Elle a …”) and suggested instead “la vie en rose.” Suddenly Edith had the title, lyrics, and music of the composition that would be translated into scores of languages as her theme song. But meanwhile she made a gift of it to Marianne; Piaf would not record “La Vie en rose” until two years later.
In July, she and Montand performed at Chez Carrère, a chic nightspot with white walls, chairs, curtains, and piano where they were to sing as if they had dropped in at a private club. At Piaf’s request, Montand was given a role in her new movie, Etoile sans lumière, to be directed by her friend Marcel Blistène. The scenario, written for Piaf while Blistène was in hiding during the war, became the occasion for her finest cinematic performance. As Madeleine, the double (or “invisible star”) whose incandescent voice replaces that of a silent-film actress in her first talkie, Piaf would sing five new songs; Montand would play her provincial sweetheart. It may have hit home when Madeleine told her fiancé that their nuptials had to be postponed: “You’re still a bit young,” she explains. “You have to grow up!” By then Montand’s growing reputation had made his offscreen “fiancée” apprehensive.
Still, they found much to enjoy despite the strains in their relationship and the bleakness of postwar Paris—where the power often failed, and staples like milk and meat could be had only at extraordinary prices. The day after Yves’s brother and sister watched them perform at L’Etoile, Edith invited her “in-laws” to a restaurant for a banquet, which they washed down with the best wines. The next morning, Lydia found the couple reading a Molière play aloud in bed, Edith having taken on the role of mentor as she learned it from Bourgeat, Asso, and Meurisse. (To interest both the masses and the intellectuals, she said, Yves must read the poet Verlaine and the philosopher Bergson.) The couple celebrated the first postwar Bastille Day at the Place de la Concorde, where Piaf sang in honor of De Gaulle. For the rest of the summer, their unspoken tensions simmered as they completed Etoile sans lumière, which ends with Piaf walking alone down a dark Paris street.
Some of their friends ascribed the pair’s difficulties to professional rivalry. In the more nuanced view of Montand’s biographers, “What triggered their shared distress was that the[ir] program had simply become too much for the average audience.… They were not evenly matched. Montand, the revelation of the season, could afford to let himself be kicked around a little by a major star, but Piaf, however fervent an admirer of her protégé, had a reputation to defend.”
In September, she upheld her reputation in a solo stint at L’Etoile with the songs composed by Contet and Monnot for Etoile sans lumière, including the rousing “Chant du pirate,” with Piaf as pirate chief, and “Adieu mon coeur,” a torchy farewell to love and to the time when vagabond rhymed with chanson. The opening-night audience was so enthusiastic that they kept on shouting “Bravo!” A Paris-Presse reporter wrote: “She deserves her success. Her voice is unique, sonorous, incisive, tossing off notes like birdsong that reach to the farthest seats in the house.” Awed by her dramatic ability, he praised her enactment “of a distress that has more to do with the soul than with the world.” When Chevalier came to applaud her, she told the audience how honored she was to sing for him; two weeks later, Montand accompanied her to dinner at Chevalier’s apartment.
It may have seemed that Piaf had nothing to fear, but two days before Montand was to follow her as the star attraction at L’Etoile, an adverse critique of her show there appeared in Spectateur. Her new songs were too literary, the critic wrote, too remote from her days as La Môme Piaf. She should jettison these pretentious tunes (Contet’s) and revive her old repertoire, with its cast of “small-time hoods and whores … things that are simple and true.” The arty new Piaf was “impossible,” he concluded, “too far removed from my poor dear little Môme Piaf, who was once as real as life itself.”
The day after Yves’s opening night at L’Etoile, Edith left on a tour of the north of France and Belgium. On October 28, La Dépêche de Paris hailed him as “the strongest personality to have emerged in music-hall since Charles Trenet’s now distant beginnings.” Perhaps coincidentally, Montand cabled Edith in Brussels to end their affair: “Maybe you’re right,” the cable read. “I’m too young for you. With all my heart I wish you the happiness you deserve.”
The next day Edith wrote to Jacques Bourgeat about the breakup and included Yves’s telegram with her letter. It was just as well, she rationalized. His way of breaking off revealed his character, or lack thereof: “A telegram … is easier than a letter, a letter takes too long, you dictate a telegram, what thoughtfulness, what a way to think about love.” Though her sarcasm barely disguised the blow to her pride, she declared herself better off without hi
m. “I’m desperate to devote myself to my work.… My lovers cost me far too much!” But she needed Bourgeat’s support: “I hope … you can stop seeing me as a strange little phenomenon and know that I am a woman in great pain who feels very much alone.”
Piaf was more charitable toward Montand in her memoirs. Recalling his joy in the audience’s acclaim at L’Etoile, she said, “I shall always be proud of having played a part in his success.” But after this attempt at kindness, she quoted a remark of Chevalier’s: “There are those who say … ‘It’s taken you a while to get to the top,’ and those who say, ‘You got there fast.’ Have you noticed that it is the first who are one’s real friends? They’re my pillars of strength, the ones who know I’ve had to work hard.” In her own voice, she observed that “a sense of métier, which has to accompany talent, cannot come from nowhere; it has to be acquired gradually.”
Piaf may have believed that Montand had reached the top too fast (and at her expense), but friends observed that their relations followed a familiar pattern. “When Edith managed to get from someone what she hoped to obtain,” Danielle Bonel explained, “there wasn’t much left for her to do. When she had nothing more to say or to impart, that person no longer interested her.” Having played Pygmalion to her lover/protégé/partner, she would watch him continue his climb to fame without her.
Piaf celebrated her thirtieth birthday at the Club des Cinq, the chic Montmartre nightspot where Michel Emer’s orchestra was adapting American jazz to French taste. Singing Emer’s “Je m’en fous pas mal” each night encouraged her to thumb her nose at life’s vicissitudes: “Y peut m’arriver n’importe quoi / Je m’en fous pas mal.” (“No matter what happens to me / I don’t give a damn.”) During her December engagement at the club (which had been launched by friends of the boxer Marcel Cerdan), she also sang at a Christmas Eve gala on the same program as Montand but with top billing. That month, there were more milestones to celebrate. It had been ten years since her discovery by Leplée and her first record. In January 1946, she moved back to the Hôtel Alsina, perhaps to put the Montand affair behind her even as they took care to maintain good relations once he too started singing at the Club des Cinq.
No Regrets Page 13