“I can think of only one thing, to join him,” Piaf told Bourgeat three days later. “I have nothing left to live for. Singing? I sang for him. My repertoire was full of love, and you can be sure that I’ll sing my story each night. What’s more, each song reminds me of his gestures, things he said, everything reminds me of him. It was the first time I was really happy. I lived for him, he was my reason for being, for my car, my clothes, the springtime, they were all for him.” Along with intense grief, she was also suffering from acute arthritic pain in her joints. The first of a series of attacks that would plague her for the rest of her life, it was a condition brought on, her entourage thought, by the shock to her system after the death of Cerdan.
Some weeks later, she told another friend, “I try in vain to understand but I can’t. The pain gets worse each day. I would never have imagined I’d wish for death as a deliverance, a joy. I was someone who loved life and now I hate it.” On November 10, after Cerdan’s remains were identified by his watchband (a gift from Piaf), a state funeral was held in France, where his disappearance was a national tragedy. Piaf wrote to the actor Robert Dalban—who, like her, believed that the living could contact the spirit world: “You can take me where I’ll be shown that he is still alive.… If I don’t get that chance, I’m done for.”
Since Edith’s early readings in Greek thought with Bourgeat, she had continued to read philosophical texts on the nature of the soul, which led her to more esoteric theories. Another friend recalled: “I would have expected her to like detective stories, but no, she read Plato.… We talked about things like the immortality of the soul.” If one accepted this doctrine, it was only a step to think that twin souls would meet in heaven, a hope that she deemed essential to go on living.
At her request, Piaf’s intimates flew to be with her while she completed her run at the Versailles. Dédée Bigard came to New York soon after Cerdan’s death and resumed work as Edith’s secretary. A few weeks later, despite his poor health, Bourgeat arrived to console his Piafou; he introduced her to the doctrine of reincarnation as propounded by the secret society known as the Rosicrucians. Though the revelation of these mystical truths was comforting, Edith derived more immediate solace once Momone also joined her and saw the advantage in giving Edith what she desired—a way to contact the Beyond.
A small pedestal table purchased in New York became the means of communication during the séances conducted by Momone and her co-conspirators over the next two years. Berteaut later justified her actions by saying that this piece of furniture had been necessary to keep Piaf alive. Others close to the singer saw the séances as Momone’s chance to obtain large sums of money by playing on Edith’s need to feel that she was in touch with Marcel, whose ghostly voice dictated the names of those on whom she should bestow a variety of gifts. Marc Bonel, who refused to take part in the séances, found that he was out of favor; Emer, Contet, Aznavour, and all those who told Piaf that she was being manipulated were in disgrace. It is possible that the singer knew more than she let on about the table-turning, but she wanted desperately to believe that she had not lost contact with Marcel.
Piaf’s professional life nonetheless continued as if she were in control. Not only would it damage her career if she left the Versailles before the end of her contract, but she had no wish to return to France. “I’ll wait a few months,” she told a friend. “I’m afraid to see Paris again without him.” On December 19, when she turned thirty-four, it would have been hard not to recall their trip to Paris the year before to celebrate the day together.
About that time, Piaf wrote the lyrics for a slow blues in memory of Cerdan, which she performed like an offering to the crowds at the Versailles. Until the end of her run, on January 31, 1950, she appeared each night in her black dress, went through her repertoire, then stood with her head in her hands to sing the blues that told her story, as if mourning in public. “Mon amour, je te retrouverai dans l’éternité” (“My love, we’ll meet again in heaven”) became the audiences’ favorite but was never recorded.
Years later, Piaf recovered some of the serenity that had deserted her when Cerdan died. Near the end of her life, she wrote, “I know that death is only the start of something else. Our soul regains its freedom.” But at the time, unable to regain her equilibrium, she kept on performing through sheer force of will. Piaf later wrote that she made the decision to live for her public: “Our lives do not belong to us. Courage makes us keep on till the end. In any case, since then Marcel has never left me.” But her intimates agreed that she was never the same.
Some believed that Piaf worshipped the boxer for the rest of her life because he left it when their love was at its height. “If it had gone on another year,” Berteaut conjectured, “she might have dismissed him, like all the others.” Although Danielle Bonel rarely agreed with Berteaut, she too thought that it was Cerdan’s untimely death that kept Piaf from forgetting him. In this view, his leaving her before she could tire of him allowed their story to take on mythic proportions. An early Piaf biographer wrote: “Had he lived, he probably would not have ‘lasted’ longer than the others. We must demystify this story from the start and see it as a dream, the perfect image of Piaf’s life, a bright, naïve cliché from her dark legend.”
Although tempting, it is beside the point to speculate about their relationship had Cerdan survived. Piaf’s view of earthly love as akin to the divine is disconcerting to those who do not sympathize with her spirituality. But, whatever one thinks of her mystical bent, it is more fruitful to grasp what the loss of Cerdan meant to the singer’s imagination than to “demystify” her response—to see how it shaped the rest of her career and her rapport with the audiences who shared her grief. To this end, we may recall the Freudian notion of sublimation—the coping mechanism by which erotic energy is transformed into achievements like artistic expression. From this perspective, Piaf’s actions after Cerdan’s death may be seen as ways of refocusing her energy, comforted by the knowledge that, in their own way, her compatriots mourned the death of their hero along with her.
Piaf’s fans embraced her on her return to Paris. On March 13, she sang on national television. On March 14, 16, and 18, she performed to sold-out houses at the Salle Pleyel. The opening-night audience, which included Paulette Godard and Maurice Chevalier, was overwhelmed. “She brought to life all of suffering humanity,” a critic wrote. “Each time she comes back to us from America, we are astonished by her repertoire and captivated all over again.” Her entire show—lights, staging, orchestrations—was “perfection,” he continued, but it was her particular “genius” that made audiences feel that, though she had just returned “from the land of the dollar,” her songs exhibited the same humility she had always possessed. Audiences were gripped with emotion each time she sang “Hymne à l’amour,” from then on backed by a chorus of angelic voices: the song would come to have almost mythic status. “She’s no longer just a woman,” a teary-eyed spectator exclaimed, “she’s a god.”
Critics and fans alike turned to religious imagery to express what they felt. “Piaf is a fallen angel, a creature of heights and depths,” another critic rhapsodized. “Her story is simple: she begins with love and ends with death.” It was agreed that Cerdan’s name was not to be mentioned, but readers understood the reference, just as they grasped the critic’s allusion to the singer as Mary Magdalene. Over the years, each time listeners heard “Hymne à l’amour,” it became more deeply identified with Piaf as celebrant of the cult of eternal love.
By the end of March, when the newly consecrated diva left for two weeks at the Variétés Theater in Marseille, she had already begun gathering round her the entourage that seemed to offer her practical and emotional support. The large Boulogne residence bought for Cerdan in 1949 (where renovation was still ongoing) became the space in which she reinvented her “family.” Edith moved into the ground-floor rooms intended for the concierge, where she would remain even when the work was complete. Dédée Bigard worked in an o
ffice on the same floor; Aznavour, who occupied one of the maids’ rooms, joined Piaf’s staff as chauffeur, lighting man, and, within a short time, songwriter; other show-business friends moved in and formed a court around their hostess. Despite their reservations, members of her household had to accept Momone and her daughter, Edith, along with the séances to evoke Cerdan’s spirit.
On arrival in Marseille in March, Piaf met a man she took to be a kindred spirit—Tony Frank, the manager of the Variétés, who told her that he was having trouble keeping the theater afloat. They became lovers. She hoped that his idea of love accorded with hers: “I need to feel that those I love really need me,” she wrote after returning to Paris. “When a man, a real man, becomes a little boy with the woman he loves, it’s the most beautiful gift.” Love was everything; it was her god, she wrote (reversing the usual formulation): “L’amour c’est tout puisque c’est Dieu.”
Edith’s conviction of love’s divinity was already being tested in her Boulogne household. Soon after her return from New York, she contacted Marinette Cerdan, who invited her to Morocco even though she knew of Edith’s affair with Marcel. Their entente as co-mourners resulted in the Cerdan family’s moving to Boulogne. Edith took responsibility for their welfare (including benefits like a mink coat for Marinette) out of her desire to give the boxer’s sons the life he had wanted for them and also to show the world that his widow embraced the woman who had been her rival. Only conventional minds found their rapport hard to understand, she wrote: “Marinette and I had been changed by [the same] man.”
By the beginning of May, with Momone suffering the consequences of an overactive love life and Cerdan’s son Paul needing an operation, Edith wondered if she had taken on too much. “I don’t know if I’m an artist or everyone’s mother,” she told Tony Frank. She was praying for a solution to his financial woes; meanwhile, he should read Marcel’s favorite, The Keys of the Kingdom. Love was “more precious than money,” she continued; he had “a real fortune” in his daughter. Edith trusted her lover enough to tell him about Cécelle’s death, a subject she rarely mentioned.
Momone’s unexpected pregnancy meant that there would soon be five children in the house, she told him a few days later. She would have to turn the living room into a dormitory; meanwhile, she, Momone, and Marinette were all knitting. The star wished that she could drop everything and spend time with Tony, especially now that Momone was quarreling with Dédée—who would soon leave Edith, after ten years in her service. Submerged in “this bitch of a life,” Edith wrote, she found solace at church: “It’s the only place where I can draw new strength.”
Her current run at the A.B.C. and her new records lifted her spirits somewhat, especially “Hymne à l’amour.” In the first recording of the song she had written for Cerdan, the orchestration and choruses create a mystical sound that builds to the coda, where, on an almost Wagnerian note, Piaf exalts love’s ability to outlast death. “Playing with a very effective use of rubato and the alternation between vocal power and restraint,” a critic writes, “Edith Piaf’s interpretation is highly expressive, in complete accord with the ecstatic intensity of the words.”
Piaf’s mood often darkened when she returned to Boulogne, where she spent most of her time with Momone. “When she knows that I’m sad, she is all the more so,” she told Tony Frank. “I see the reflection of my pain in her eyes. It’s amazing, don’t you think, a friendship like this brings one comfort and makes up for a lot?” But she also yearned for the warmth of Tony’s “beaux yeux,” a phrase that recurs in her letters and may have inspired her to compose “C’est d’la faute à tes yeux”—the confession of a woman who tells her dead lover that she killed him “because of your eyes.”
With Momone as her mirror, the singer’s moods were reflected back in ways that worked to her old friend’s advantage. Having regained her ascendancy, Momone found that she could share Edith’s largesse with the Cerdans, who returned to Morocco some months later with suitcases full of presents. In this context, Tony Frank’s reluctance to exploit his liaison with Piaf seems admirable—though he may also have found her idea of l’amour too exalted. “We live in a time when money and business are more important than feelings,” she told him. Being deeply in love meant that “nothing matters except the beloved,” she wrote when he started backing away from their relationship.
Only one man had loved her as she wished, Edith wrote on May 26. “I will never again encounter such a wonderful thing,” she continued, because men were so “petit.” Because of their spiritual smallness, they could not compare with this “grand” member of their sex (there was no need to name him), who had done everything he could to please her: “When I put him to the test, he was upright and willing.” She would gladly see Tony if he chose to awaken from his slumbers, but in the meantime, it was goodbye.
Piaf again turned her mind to the business affairs that, in her view, assumed too much importance, and all that spring rehearsed the new songs composed for her by her old favorites, Monnot, Emer, Contet, Glanzberg, and, soon, Aznavour. Between engagements, in June, she recorded six new songs, including Glanzberg’s somewhat predictable waltz “Il fait bon t’aimer” (“It’s good loving you”), which may have evoked Marcel as she crooned seductively, “Auprès de toi je n’ai plus peur / Je me sens trop bien à l’abri / T’as fermé la porte au malheur / Il n’entrera plus, t’es plus fort que lui.” (“Close to you I’m not afraid / I feel so safe / You closed the door on unhappiness / You’re so strong it can’t come in.”)
On a different note, Piaf’s lively rendition of Emer’s “La Fête continue” evoked her youth in a counterpoint blending fairground noises with tales of le petit peuple—a “gosse” with sick parents, lovers planning suicide because they cannot marry, mourners who (like Edith) resort to séances to reach loved ones. Her subtle changes in coloration enhanced the contrast between these individual lives and the festive crowd’s oblivion: “La fête bat son plein, musique et manèges / … / Chansons, balançoires, la fête continue.” (“The fair’s in full swing, music, merry-go-rounds / … / Songs, seesaws, the fair carries on.”) Listeners resonated as Piaf sang of life’s way of going on despite loss; Emer’s melody was named the best song in the réaliste tradition at the Concours de la Chanson Française.
About this time, when Edith was also recording songs in English for her first American album, she met the man who would help her to carry on. During her June engagement at the Baccarat club, a brawny American with a pockmarked face presented himself as her new translator, having already done an English version of “Hymne à l’amour.” After studying music in Vienna, Eddie Constantine had pursued a lackluster career in the United States. In France, playing on the vogue for American culture and his resemblance to a gangster, he had opened shows for Lucienne Boyer and Suzy Solidor. But it was Constantine’s nearly incomprehensible French that caught Piaf’s attention. As he struggled to make an impression on the star, she burst out laughing. Constantine sized up the opportunity. He was separated from his wife, he said, who was living in the States with their daughter. Piaf told her entourage that, given this state of affairs, she would not be wrecking a marriage, though some thought that the Constantines had an understanding that left the brash “Ricain” free to pursue his career as he saw fit.
Just the same, Edith’s entourage was glad when Constantine moved into the Boulogne house and received her regulation gifts for lovers—a gold watch, cuff links, alligator shoes, and a blue suit tailored for his impressive physique. “Edith always needed someone to love,” Aznavour wrote. “We knew that a page had been turned in the story of the household; a new one was being written even though Marcel was not forgotten.” When Piaf recorded “Hymne à l’amour” in English that summer, it seemed like an endorsement of her song’s translator.
Constantine and Aznavour worked out a division of labor, with the former in the role of Monsieur Piaf (the household’s name for her latest beau) and the latter her right-hand man. They accepted
her idées fixes, such as seeing her favorite films (Wuthering Heights, The Third Man) every night for a week, eating only when and what she wanted, or dropping everything to listen to Beethoven’s symphonies. In July and August, while they toured resort towns together, she tried to teach Constantine to speak French and worked on his performance style. Although he was no Montand, she took him to New York for her three-month engagement at the Versailles that fall, partly to shield herself from memories of life there with Cerdan, partly to show that she was recovering from his loss with the aid of her “Ricain.”
“Edith Piaf’s summer tour will end with her marriage to her partner, Eddie Constantine,” L’Aurore announced. Their engagement was all but official, the paper claimed, except for the fact that Constantine was still married. Meanwhile, the two singers were “the best of friends”—their close rapport made clear in the accompanying photo of the couple. Piaf persuaded Aznavour to write for Constantine, jazzy melodies to exploit his nonchalant manner and establish his image as a tenderhearted tough guy. Looking back on this time, Constantine let on that it had been impossible to resist Edith once she made up her mind: “When she turned on the charm, it was over. She could have made a tall building fall down with just one look.”
After Piaf, Constantine, Aznavour, and the rest of her entourage arrived in New York on September 7, she took them all by taxi to a Brooklyn cinema where The Third Man was playing. Reigning over her court like a despot, she handed out punishments (such as no more movies) to those who disobeyed orders or, like Aznavour, fell asleep when Orson Welles came on the screen. In public, she showed the professionalism she always brought to performances, but she told Constantine that in the midst of a classic like “L’Accordéoniste,” she sometimes thought about finances.
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