From the start, she treated the young singer like a brother. One night in Geneva, when the take was minimal, she declared, “We’re street kids, we can cope, but the others have to eat”; they burst out laughing at the idea of the well-brought-up Compagnons passing the hat. Fred Mella got on well with Aznavour and Roche, but Jean-Louis Jaubert worried about the duo’s propensity for living it up, which meant encouraging Edith to misbehave. (Aznavour stocked their train compartment with beer hidden under the seats and in the luggage rack.) After leaving the tour in April, Charles realized that he cared for Edith. “I wasn’t in love,” he wrote. “I was dependent. In a few days I saw … it was the same for her: ‘I’d never have thought I’d miss you so much,’ she wrote, signing the cable, ‘your little sister from the streets, Edith.’ ”
Although she normally banned traveling companions from her entourage, Edith agreed that wives could accompany Les Compagnons on their Scandinavian tour that spring. What she did not know was that one of the group, Guy Bourguignon, had fallen in love with a sixteen-year-old named Ginou Richer. The stress of keeping his sweetheart hidden in their hotel room shattered Bourguignon’s concentration. When the group learned the reason for his distracted air, they told Edith—who ordered Ginou to leave but changed her mind when the girl volunteered to do her hair. Ginou soon became her accomplice. Years later, writing about their friendship, she emphasized Edith’s joie de vivre—“her sense of humor, her mischievous ways, her love of jokes and nonsense”—and her own role as the singer’s “playmate.”
Egged on by Edith, the group enjoyed themselves at every opportunity. In May, it was warm enough for picnics in the forest. They brought more beer than sandwiches, Ginou recalled; she and Edith danced the cancan while the men played drinking games they had invented in Edith’s honor. After weeks of sampling the varieties of smoked fish on the menu, Edith invited everyone to her room for pasta, prepared in the bathroom. Her only disappointment came in Stockholm, when most of the audience did not come back for her star turn, after the intermission. The manager explained that in Sweden stars appeared before the second half, which featured lesser acts. Piaf then changed the order of performance to suit the Swedes, who came in great numbers. On their last night, when the orchestra played “La Marseillaise” and a member of the audience gave her a heart-shaped bouquet of blue, white, and red flowers, she burst into tears. “When you’ve been singing in your own language in a foreign country and you are honored this way, with no warning,” she recalled, “it touches you very deeply.”
Edith returned to Paris in June to finalize plans for their engagement at the Playhouse Theater in New York. After a round of appearances at resorts, she sang for a month at L’Etoile with Aznavour’s duo and Les Compagnons, who joined her for recording sessions and one of the first French television broadcasts. It would have been a shock to receive a negative review of her Etoile recital. The critic asked whether the audience’s “fervor” was justified, since in his view her voice did not have “the same ardor” as in the past; moreover, the staging was too polished to evoke a response, a state of affairs he attributed to her preparations for New York. Rather than adapt to the American love of glamour, “she should go back to being what she was, a girl from the poor districts,” he advised. (Les Compagnons, he wrote, were “perfection.”)
Piaf was perhaps too busy to notice this criticism in the month before her departure, when she also began filming a movie entitled (like her radio broadcasts) Neuf Garçons et un coeur. Counting on Piaf’s fame, the director Georges Freedland devised a fairy-tale script that let his one set do double duty—as the sordid Pigalle club where her character seeks work for her singers, and the paradise to which they are transported in a dream. Although the film was a musical (including “Sophie,” which she took back from Montand, “Les Trois Cloches,” and “La Vie en rose”), characters did not burst into song for no reason, Freedland explained. In his view, Piaf was a fine actress: “She didn’t just sing her songs, she interpreted them, played with them, lived them.” Moreover, she revealed her sense of humor in the scenes that allowed her to be “droll.” He added, “Piaf was very funny.… She never played the ‘star’ or put herself first.”
On October 9, the day after they finished shooting, she, Les Compagnons, Marc Bonel, Loulou Barrier, and the rest of her entourage boarded the Queen Elizabeth for New York. “I don’t do things by half-measures,” Piaf observed. “I was saying goodbye to old Europe for a time.… The theater managers knew that I was going away, that it would be some time before they would see me again.”
Even before they docked in Manhattan, Piaf was besieged by journalists. “Smile, Edith,” the photographers said, to her dismay until she got used to the American habit of using first names—their way of showing affection, she decided. It was harder to get used to their way of saying her name: to French ears it sounded like “Eedees.” (To Americans, “Edith” pronounced in French resembled “Ay-deet.”) Unsure how to introduce the little French star to its readers, the New York Times called her a torch singer who “during the war won a large following among our GIs.” She was an odd kind of chanteuse, another Times reporter wrote: “no sequins, no slinkiness, no sophistication for Mlle. Piaf,” nor would her appearance have matched “a Hollywood casting director’s notion of good looks.”
While Les Compagnons marveled at the scale of life in prosperous New York—the skyscrapers, street carts purveying hot dogs at all hours, the Camel cigarette man blowing smoke rings over Times Square—Edith studied the American character. New Yorkers were always in a hurry, she decided, yet they were punctual, “a quality that I find commendable because I do not possess it myself.” What was more, they kept their promises. They were also “practical” and “easily pleased,” and had a touch of “just-a-boy-at-heart naïveté” that she found endearing. Soon after their arrival, a small plane flew over Manhattan with a streamer that read “Maurice Chevalier is coming back,” the United States having finally granted him a visa after his exoneration at home. If Chevalier was the typical Frenchman abroad, Piaf might become his female counterpart—provided she could express herself in English as he did, with a touch of Belleville gouaille and a “charming” French accent.
Edith set about learning English with the help of a tutor named Miss Davidson, one of the punctual Americans she admired in principle but whose 11 a.m. arrivals quickly lost their charm. In between lessons she studied a manual called L’Anglais sans peine (English Without Tears), which explained that the English “th” was pronounced as if one were lisping. But Miss Davidson’s knowledge of Belleville slang soon outshone Edith’s command of English. Still, she had “La Vie en rose” and other songs translated for New York audiences and set about learning them word by word. “What a marvelous country, and such kind people,” she wrote Bourgeat. “My nerves are on edge. I really want to touch their hearts, because I’m quite fond of them.”
Opening night, October 30, was a success, in large part because of the luminaries who came to the Playhouse in numbers—among them Lena Horne, Greta Garbo, Noël Coward, Gene Kelly, John Garfield, and Marlene Dietrich, who would become one of Edith’s closest friends. These veterans of show business enjoyed the old-fashioned variety show (hetero- and homosexual dance teams, unicycle riders, and two male gymnasts billed as “Poetry in Motion”) that preceded Les Compagnons, the highlight of the first act. After the intermission, they applauded warmly for each of Piaf’s eight numbers, including “Le Disque usé,” “Si tu partais,” and “La Vie en rose”—introduced by a master of ceremonies who gave awkward translations of the lyrics. (Her slangy classic “Je m’en fous pas mal” became “I Shouldn’t Care,” but listeners responded nonetheless to its insouciance.)
One member of the audience remained unmoved by Piaf’s entire program. The prominent critic George Jean Nathan began by allowing that four dollars was a lot to pay for a show “of the kind encountered in the past in one or another of the little music halls on the Paris Left Bank, admission to
which was a few francs, or in some cases, merely the appearance of having enough sous in one’s pocket to pay for a beer.” Nathan’s review went downhill rapidly. Calling those who applauded Les Compagnons a claque, he reserved his barbs for the “small, chunky woman with tousled reddish hair, heavily mascara’d eyes, and a mouth made up to look like a quart bottle of [mercurochrome].” After noting her “forlorn appearance,” he disparaged her voice, “which, whatever the nature of the song, cultivates the pitch and tone of gulpy despair.” In his view, her repertoire was “the standard boulevard one: the song about l’amour, the song about the married woman retracing the joys and sorrows of her tragic life … the other one about the forsaken prostitute, and so on.” Nathan ended by dismissing those who liked Piaf because she was French: “In a colder and more critical land … her appeal misses something.”
She could have not found much comfort in the lukewarm New York Times review: “She is a genuine artist in a particular tradition,” the critic allowed, “making no concessions to a heedless metropolis abroad.” The audiences’ lack of response to her in the weeks that followed made Edith feel that she might as well go home. New Yorkers did not respond to her storytelling: they simply wanted to dance. Years later, she understood that by 1947 most Americans preferred musicals to vaudeville-style revues, or favored bubbly tunes like “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.” Except for the GIs who had seen her in France, they had little knowledge of songs that lacked a happy ending. Audiences had expected her to sing “syrupy melodies where amour rhymes with toujours and … tendresse with ivresse or caresse,” Piaf recalled. What she did not say in her memoir was that Les Compagnons had stolen the show. If her réalisme, which came across as world-weariness, puzzled Manhattanites, the group’s boyish energy suited their wish for an upbeat evening.
Her memoirs also fail to mention her disenchantment with Jaubert. Despite her threats to dissolve their partnership unless he married her, he refused to do so, because she was a Catholic. A misalliance would break his mother’s heart. “I’ve had enough,” she wrote Bourgeat on November 4. “I deserve better.” She had already found Jaubert’s successor—Marcel Cerdan, who was in New York for a few days before his return to France. Once in Paris, the boxer would call on Bourgeat at Piaf’s request. “I hope you will love him as I do,” she continued. “He loves me sincerely, without any thought of gain. I hope you will show him how to improve himself as he really wants to.… Before each match he makes the sign of the cross.” Cerdan, a man of the people, respected her but did not need her, she wrote: “I need him, he makes me feel safe.” Because Cerdan was married, she told Bourgeat to keep their affair a secret.
Edith’s professionalism kept her from breaking her contract despite New Yorkers’ failure to embrace her. Their lackluster response did not change until the composer Virgil Thomson wrote in the Herald Tribune that her performances demonstrated “the art of the chansonnière … at its most classical.” Showing his compatriots how to take this foreign import, he noted her stationary stance and sparing gestures, the purity of her diction, and her “tremendous” power of projection. “She is a great artist because she gives you a clear vision of the scene or subject she is depicting, with a minimum injection of personality. Such a concentration at once of professional authority and of personal modesty is both delightful and no end impressive.”
A few days later, a New Yorker “Talk of the Town” piece extolled Piaf’s charms. Having heard the singer in Paris, a staff writer wanted to see if she had “brightened up her repertory … on the theory that Americans demand optimism.” Asked about “those wonderful sad songs she used to sing,” Piaf said that though their heroes all died at the end, she was not a pessimist: “there is always a little corner of blue sky … somewhere.” Her song entitled “Mariage” was different in that it began “in the cell of a woman who has already murdered her husband. She reviews her life, she hears the wedding bells, she sees herself in the arms of this man whom she has killed, an innocent young bride.” Though Piaf had not herself married or killed anyone, in her view love always turned out badly. “But,” she added, “I’m always optimistic.” At the Playhouse, the writer was delighted to hear some of her gloomier hits—“Mon Légionnaire” (“that old honey about the woman who falls in love with a Foreign Legion soldier … and he gets killed”), “L’Accordéoniste” (“an accordionist goes off to the war and gets killed”), and “Escale” (a woman’s “one big night” with a sailor who “gets drowned”). The article concludes, “I haven’t had such a good time in years.”
Together Virgil Thomson’s review and the tongue-in-cheek New Yorker piece provoked a turnaround in public opinion that kept Piaf from going home. She told Les Compagnons to perform in Miami without her over the holidays when they received an offer, and gave all of them presents to show that there were no hard feelings. After their departure, she went back to work with Miss Davidson, in the hope of introducing her songs by herself. At the end of November, Clifford Fischer negotiated an eight-week solo engagement for her at the Versailles Club at the handsome fee of three thousand dollars per week, starting in the new year.
Edith hesitated at first because of the club’s name: it brought back memories of the night she and her friends spent in the Versailles jail after their misadventure with the innkeeper who let them dine on credit. Once she agreed to appear there, she realized that the Versailles was one of Manhattan’s most intimate yet sophisticated clubs. The room filled each night with celebrities, people from the Social Register, and, as Piaf learned to say, VIPs. Less boisterously commercial than the Stork Club, the Versailles appealed to New York’s cognoscenti—those who thought the rococo décor worth the price they paid to sip champagne and listen to the chanteuse they had read about in The New Yorker.
Each night, the talkative crowd went silent when Piaf stepped onto a raised platform. “She had us mesmerized,” a member of the audience recalled. “You thought about the sadness of her songs; even the boys got misty-eyed. The language didn’t matter a bit. You felt that she’d had a hard-knock life, that she’d seen everything and turned it into this hypnotic music.” At the end of the show, people climbed on the tables to applaud in hopes of hearing “La Vie en rose” all over again.
The European-born critic Nerin Gun found Piaf’s English “quaint but understandable.” He thought so highly of her performance that he quoted the reaction of the VIP politician at the next table. “Until now,” the man said, “the French stars we have seen have been sophisticated images of Gay Paree, ready to sell their sex appeal. Edith Piaf is different. She is a great artist whose voice hits you in the gut, but at the same time she’s a wan little thing who looks hungry, as if she suffered as a child and is still somewhat afraid. She represents the new European generation that so much deserves our help.” We do not know what Piaf thought of being a justification for the Marshall Plan, but she quoted Gun at length in her memoirs.
Just the same, illness and depression plagued her at times during the cold New York winter. At 4 a.m. one night she sounded delirious when she phoned Marc Bonel and Loulou Barrier to ask for help. “She said that she was dying,” Bonel recalled. “No one loved her, she had no father, no child, no friends except for Loulou and me.” She did not recognize them when they arrived but, calmed by their presence, fell asleep. Piaf was working too hard, Bonel thought, with English lessons, piano lessons, rehearsals all day, performances at night, “and no love since Jean-Louis left.” He understood for the first time that there was another Piaf: “a woman thrown off-balance by success and money. Though she’s made her way with her talent, she’s a sad little bird, a poor kid deprived of tenderness.”
Les Compagnons returned from Miami in time to replace Edith at the Versailles when she again fell ill. Having decided that he could go against his mother’s wishes after all, Jaubert asked her to marry him. It was too late. Yet she would go on working with the group, she told Bourgeat, though she found their attitude disappointing now that they were a success. Still, they we
re right to sing without her, because “we both have to make our names here on our own.” She would stay with them until she had turned them into stars. Meanwhile, she was having a fling with John Garfield. She had worshipped the actor since she first saw him on the screen, she told Bourgeat, but, though his virility was impressive, he too was married. Their affair ended after a few weeks, when Garfield introduced her to his wife. “You have no idea how much I crave a calmer, gentler life,” she wrote. “I’m not meant to have heaps of lovers. At the end of each affair I’m more disgusted than ever. I’d like one true, wholesome love.”
Though Edith wished that Bourgeat could come to New York to help her through this time, she found solace in her growing rapport with Marlene Dietrich, the “fairy godmother” to whom she turned for advice. The actress was touched by Edith’s lack of self-confidence. “She was for ever calling herself ugly and insecure,” Dietrich recalled, “yet such was her charisma that she could have had any man she wanted.” Piaf’s memoirs are dithyrambic on the subject of the tall, self-disciplined actress: “When she saw me downcast, worried, near breaking point, she made it her mission to help me; she took care not to leave me alone with my thoughts. Because of her I was able to face my problems.… I owe her a profound debt of gratitude.” In the future, she would always wear Marlene’s gift, a gold cross set with emeralds, around her neck.
Men like Garfield, Piaf came to see, were attracted to her fame. Years later, she wrote, “Men treated me like some territory which had to be conquered, even though deep inside I still felt pure.… I have never kept the man of my life in my arms for very long. Sometimes it is over nothing—a word out of place, or some unimportant lie and my lover vanishes. Then I pray that a miracle will lead me into other arms.” During the icy winter of 1948, she closed each performance at the Versailles with “La Vie en rose,” the audience’s favorite and her private prayer for a miracle. As far as the French were concerned, the little chanteuse had conquered New York: “Edith Piaf has won the Americans’ hearts,” Ce Soir told its readers. “She will have a career there for many years now that Broadway has adopted her.”
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