CHAPTER TEN
1948–1949
On February 27, 1948, as Piaf’s engagement at the Versailles was coming to an end, Cerdan returned to New York to prepare for his March 12 match with Lavern Roach, boxing’s “Rookie of the Year” in 1947. The contest between the young ex-marine and the “Moroccan Bombardier” was something of a mismatch, given Cerdan’s greater experience—except that the American had the local boxing world’s support. If Roach prevailed, Cerdan believed, he would lose his chance at the world middleweight championship, the crown he coveted.
Marcel spent as much time as he could with Edith despite his managers’ attempts to keep him in training, which required celibacy. More cautious than usual about their affair—it was too new and mattered too deeply—she did not mention it again to Bourgeat, saying only that she missed her old friend and looked forward to seeing him after her return on March 17. She would explain everything once she was in Paris.
It would have been difficult to tell all at this point. Piaf still had strong ties to Les Compagnons, who had just come back from an engagement in Boston. They planned to sail to France together on the day of Cerdan’s bout until Piaf announced that she intended to take the plane a few days later with Jaubert (who would unwittingly serve as her cover). After seeing off the group, Jaubert accompanied Piaf to Madison Square Garden. Cerdan had asked her to stay to bring him luck, she told the French journalist who noted her presence there. (A photo shows her in an uncharacteristically frilly hat with a bow tied under her chin.) Having “conquered the American public,” he wrote, Piaf was now “giving her whole voice to encourage Marcel.”
Cerdan would not have needed extra support except that the referee, a certain Donovan, was said to favor his opponent. Edith watched from her ringside seat as Marcel kept knocking Roach down while Donovan waited however long it took for the younger man to stand up again. After Donovan allowed Roach thirty-two seconds on the canvas, an unheard-of respite, the crowd called out in the Frenchman’s favor. Even Donovan had to admit that the match was over when Cerdan gave Roach a decisive blow in the eighth round.
A Paris-Presse journalist asked Edith what she thought of the evening. “I’ve felt all sorts of emotions,” she said, “but this goes far beyond them. It’s fantastic to see one of our guys, all alone in the ring among thousands of ‘Ricains’ [Americans], defending our prestige.” She had taken no interest in boxing before; in fact, she hated it. But now that she knew Marcel, she had changed her mind. “It’s not the same, it’s beautiful when he does it.” Having surprised herself by yelling, “Go on, Marcel, kill him!,” she knew what it meant to have “heart trouble.”
Although Edith’s heart trouble was not apparent when she and Marcel came down the gangway from the plane at Orly, it would have been impossible to miss their happiness. Both are radiant in the many photographs taken that day to welcome France’s champions. Just as telling—for those in the know—was Jaubert’s position several steps behind them. When Les Compagnons asked about Edith at their reunion the next day, he said wryly, “With Marcel, it’s not a contest of equals.”
One can imagine Edith’s joy at having found her equal—to her mind, the perfect match. Having been in the maternal role for years, as she nurtured the younger men who claimed her affections, she now felt cherished by someone who would protect her as she had protected others. Marcel would look after her despite the obstacles on their path, his marriage and their place in the public eye as France’s best-known celebrities. Meanwhile, they would present themselves as friends—compatriots whose desire to conquer the United States had brought them together.
Cerdan’s blend of gentleness and strength made Edith go weak at the knees. “I worshipped him like a god,” she wrote. “I would have done anything for him!” Like many strong men, he had a softness that showed in his generosity to those who were weaker than himself. At the same time, his self-confidence allowed him to accept her love tokens, the gold watch, tailored suits, and nubbly sweaters she kept knitting and tucking into his suitcase to bring him luck. Marcel’s purity of spirit, seemingly untainted by success, made her feel utterly safe in his presence.
What was more, they had an intuitive understanding of each other’s professions. Both had come from nothing and made their way to the top while retaining an innate modesty. (Perhaps remembering Aîcha’s flea circus, Piaf laughed out loud when Cerdan told her about his pig farm.) Both knew what it meant to stand before the volatile public. Just as Edith took possession of the stage to establish communion with her audience, so Marcel occupied the ring like the celebrant of some ancient rite. Being the cynosure of all eyes allowed both to know the mixed state of trance and solitude often felt by those who perform in public.
Cerdan fell for Piaf’s charm, her talent, and her conviction that what mattered more than anything was passionate love. He deeply admired the little singer. “Just look at her,” he often said. “How can such a big voice belong to such a tiny woman?” He confessed to a friend that she had shown him what love was; he was besotted, she “had gotten under his skin.” Cerdan asked only that their liaison be kept secret to spare Marinette, his wife. Accepting his conditions, Edith said that she had no intention of breaking up their marriage; the few journalists in the know honored the boxer’s request.
Soon after their return to Paris, Edith rented an apartment where they could live together discreetly. Its location—in the sixteenth arrondissement, near the Auteuil Church—may have recalled the days when, accompanied by Momone, she sang for the residents of this bourgeois quartier. What mattered most, she told her old friend (Momone having been reinstated in her good graces at this propitious moment), was to provide privacy for Marcel—to hide him from the journalists who dogged his footsteps while he prepared for his next fight.
Cerdan rose early to run in the Bois de Boulogne, then trained all day with his sparring partners. Barely managing to stay awake at night while Piaf rehearsed with Monnot, he lost himself in his favorite reading matter, children’s books and comics about heroes like Buffalo Bill, Joe Palooka, and Tom Mix. When they went out for the evening, the boxer lay down on the backseat of Edith’s car to avoid being seen, an obligation that vexed him but made Edith laugh. Meanwhile, she performed throughout the spring with Les Compagnons, who were still her official partners: as a group, they were much in demand following the successful run of their film, Neuf Garçons et un coeur.
One day Edith invited Bourgeat to meet Marcel, in the hope that her mentor would introduce him to the classics as he had done for her. Whereas her engagement with Plato had given her a taste for readings on the spiritual life, Marcel preferred lighter things, like A. J. Cronin’s best-seller The Keys of the Kingdom—the story of a priest who lives in imitation of Jesus, his hero. The book became a talisman for the boxer; he carried it everywhere. Yet, though it opened his eyes to higher things, he let Edith go alone to the nearby church when she wanted to pray. In time Bourgeat would be able to educate Cerdan, she thought, but it was better to start “with things that aren’t too complicated,” and to acquaint him with what Jacquot called her own “evolution.”
Edith had already come a long way. Inspired by having found the love that she craved, she entered into a period of creativity that resulted in new songs for herself and her singing partners. “Les Yeux de ma mère” (“My Mother’s Eyes”), in the voice of a man who travels the world asking himself why he must fight “guys with thick skins,” became her gift to Les Compagnons. With Monnot she co-wrote several songs that alluded to her happiness—“Un Homme comme un autre,” about the ordinary man who “resembles” her songs, and “Tu n’as pas besoin de mes rêves,” an address to the man (surely the same one) whom she loves just as he is, without recourse to her dreams.
During Piaf’s spring engagement at the A.B.C., she took part in two events that, given her origins, would have seemed unlikely. Since 1947, De Gaulle’s partisans had been organizing a force capable of combating what they saw as the red menace. The RPF
(Rassemblement du Peuple Français) was not a political party, De Gaulle said, but a movement that would prevent a takeover by the French communists, who claimed that they, not the Gaullists, were the heirs of the resistance. While the left held its traditional May Day parade in Paris, Piaf performed at a massive RPF festival in the suburbs. Whether she too saw De Gaulle as the one figure capable of uniting France is not known.
Two weeks later, the future Queen Elizabeth of England asked to hear Piaf sing on a state visit to France. Deeply moved to find herself in the royal presence, Edith could only stammer that she was exhausted from having just done two matinees. The princess told her that she had been marvelous just the same and that her father, King George VI, wanted copies of her new records. But Piaf kept on babbling about her matinees: “When I went outside, I told myself, dear Edith, you must have struck her as the queen of dummies.”
The next week, she followed Cerdan’s defense of his middleweight crown against the challenger, Cyrille Delannoit, in Brussels. What should have been an easy victory became a disaster when the referee proclaimed Delannoit the winner, and Cerdan collapsed on the canvas, his dream of retiring undefeated in shreds. When he told Edith that his career was finished, she said that he must not disappoint all those who loved him and saw him as their hero—advice that she gave herself when feeling low.
Soon after Cerdan agreed to a rematch, the scandal sheet France Dimanche ran a front-page article with the headline in extra bold: PIAF A PORTÉ MALHEUR À CERDAN (“Piaf brought Cerdan bad luck”). “Since his return from America,” it read, “Cerdan has seen Edith Piaf every day. She goes to all his bouts, he goes each night to hear her sing.… She tells him about music, literature, and poetry—all new to him since he has become a man of the world.” To someone as superstitious as Edith, it was unbearable to be considered a bad influence. “Oh, the bastards,” she is said to have exclaimed. Their idyll was no longer their own affair. At the same time, Edmonde Charles-Roux recalled, the average person saw in them “the perfect couple, two people of modest background and immense talent who represented France to the world as the hero and heroine of popular imagination.”
For the next year, Piaf planned engagements in order to spend as much time as possible with Cerdan while also trying to evade the mounting public interest in their liaison. During the summer of 1948, between engagements in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, she recorded several songs written by friends whose lyrics allude to her romance with the man she called the love of her life. “Les Amants de Paris,” composed for her by Léo Ferré, let her ponder her role as a singer of love songs: “Les amants de Paris couchent sur ma chanson. / A Paris, les amants s’aiment à leur façon.” (“In Paris lovers go to bed with my songs. / In Paris couples make love as they wish.”) Ferré’s waltz ends with a request for more such melodies, so that Parisians can keep on making love: “Donnez-moi des chansons / Pour qu’on s’aime à Paris.”
About this time, Charles Aznavour brought Piaf “Il pleut,” a moody evocation of Paris in the rain, along with a more upbeat song entitled “C’est un gars” about “the guy” who entered her life. Its heroine, who sounds like a waif from Edith’s réaliste period, does not care that she is down at the heel. “A guy has come into my life,” she croons in the rising lines of the refrain, an “angel” who says what no one said before, that she is pretty. Recalling the past, she muses: “Je vivais depuis mon enfance / Dans les rues noires de l’ignorance. / Soudain, tout s’est illuminé. / Mon coeur se mit à chanter.” (“I’ve lived since childhood / In the dark streets of ignorance. / Suddenly all became light. / My heart began to sing.”) But the optimism of the final couplet may have seemed like wishful thinking: the “guy” asks the woman to spend her life with him, and she replies simply, “Oui!”
Despite the difficulty of organizing time with Cerdan, who was again in training, Edith remained in high spirits. In July, the fledgling television station Télé-Paris broadcast her concert of songs by Raymond Asso—who, with his new wife, joined her for the occasion—and a second program, with Roche and Aznavour. She slipped away to Brussels for Cerdan’s rematch with Delannoit, but stayed in her hotel room at the request of Lucien Roupp, his manager—for whom her presence in the boxer’s life was, as the headline said, a misfortune. (This time Cerdan won the match.)
In August, she arranged a week’s vacation at his training camp in Normandy. Ginou Richer, who accompanied her to the boxer’s hide-out, recalled Edith’s efforts to adapt to his schedule. She rose early, drank a glass of carrot juice, and took walks or bicycle rides. After his training sessions, they strolled in the fields of flowers surrounding their hideaway, played Monopoly (she let him win), and discussed the writers on Edith’s handpicked reading list—including Steinbeck (Cerdan liked In Dubious Battle) and Gide (of whom he asked innocently, “Do you think he might be gay?”). They made a secret pilgrimage to Lisieux to kneel at Saint Thérèse’s shrine; Edith asked the saint to take Marcel under her protection and bought the statue of her benefactress that would sit on her bedside table for the rest of her life.
Three days later, the boxer flew to New York to train for his match with Tony Zale, the world middleweight champion known as the Man of Steel. Roupp managed to keep Piaf from traveling with the fighter, but, despite her upcoming engagement at the Versailles, she flew to New York with Ginou and Momone, her old friend having rejoined her entourage. Even greater precaution was required, Roupp insisted when Edith and Momone showed up at Cerdan’s camp at Loch Sheldrake, in the Catskills. The boxer was a favorite at the small resort; on a visit there with the mayor of New York, the head of the French Municipal Council hailed Cerdan as the “best propaganda for France, the sort of man France needs.” Since Americans were known for their puritanism and the press was everywhere, Roupp had their chauffeur present Edith as his sister when she and Momone moved into the cabin next to Marcel’s. They spent their days playing gin rummy and knitting. Marcel visited each night but slept in his own cabin. “Easy on the sex,” Roupp told him. “It slows you down.”
After a week of this regimen, which excluded wine as well as sex, Piaf joined Les Compagnons on tour in Canada. She would return with enough money to buy a farm where Bourgeat could spend the rest of his days, she told him. Meanwhile, she had found happiness. “The only thing that troubles me is that Marcel isn’t free,” she continued. “One must be content with what one has, and you know very well that I would never try to destroy a part of my life. I came into his too late, so I’m the one who has to make sacrifices.” She wondered how much longer they could hide their love. “Perhaps as God sees that my goal is simply to make [Marcel] happy, He will help me as He has done till now? Dear Jacquot, sometimes I want to cry out in joy, other times my heart aches.… When I see him everything will be fine again and I’ll steal a little more happiness.”
Piaf felt that she had stolen more than her share in September, when she and Cerdan were acclaimed by the “Ricains” while managing to live undisturbed at her Park Avenue apartment. Their excitement mounted in the days before his match. The New York Times announced, “Voici M’sieur Cerdan, seeking a K-nock-oot”—a sympathetic piece mentioning his popularity with the thousands of GIs who had seen him defeat their compatriots during the war “with such finesse that at the end they cheered him.” Just the same, though boxing fans were curious about the “Frenchie,” the odds were eight to five on the Man of Steel.
On September 21, following a pre-fight steak dinner, Cerdan lit a candle to ask for the Virgin Mary’s protection, and Edith prayed to Saint Thérèse to look after “le petit.” While the boxer and his manager drove to the huge Roosevelt Stadium in Jersey City, Ginou implemented the plan that she and Edith had concocted. In anticipation of Cerdan’s victory, Ginou was to scatter the petals of seven dozen roses from the elevator door to Edith’s bed; if he lost, she would get rid of them.
Edith’s group claimed their seats just before the start of the fight. That night the photographers were more intereste
d in the skating star turned actress Sonja Henie than in the singer or her companions—Loulou Barrier, Ginou, Momone, Marc Bonel, and, nearby, the French comedian Fernandel. Edith stood up when the band played “La Marseillaise.” The boxers touched gloves; Cerdan crossed himself, and the match began.
Zale, who had recently wrested his crown from Rocky Graziano, came on strong, and Cerdan fought back vigorously. Keeping to the strategy he had devised with Roupp, the Frenchman battered the American with right and left hooks. He performed with a stunning blend of precision and grace, but Zale never stopped punching back. The spectators yelled, “Come on, Tony, kill the frog!” With each blow, Edith groaned as if she felt it herself, wringing Ginou’s arm as Marcel’s stamina seemed to desert him, then pounding the hat of the man in front of her. Cerdan erupted into a vicious two-fisted attack that baffled his opponent until the twelfth round, when Cerdan finished him off with a right uppercut. The crowd roared their approval of his artistry, and Edith burst into tears. “You won, Marcel!” she shouted. “You’re the world champion!”
The spectators were streaming into the ring to congratulate the Frenchman when Ginou raced to Manhattan, to put up Marc Bonel’s homemade signs: “Honneur à Marcel Cerdan,” “Vive notre champion du monde.” At 2 a.m., the lovers returned from their post-fight celebration at a French restaurant. Cerdan kept replaying the match until fatigue overcame him an hour later.
No Regrets Page 16