After several episodes of nearly fainting onstage, Piaf saw a doctor, who explained that she was dangerously anemic. “I should have dealt with this a long time ago,” she wrote Bourgeat. On the doctor’s orders, she was taking a powerful new drug, and for an uplift, immersing herself in Homer’s Iliad: “It’s … tremendous for my morale.” She would need all her strength on the impending anniversary of Marcel’s death: “Eddie is wonderful to me,” she added, but did not say that she often scolded him for lapses in taste and minor disagreements.
By the end of October, after managing to get through the memorial mass she arranged for Marcel, Edith told Bourgeat that she felt better. She asked for a translation of the Odyssey and thanked him for the poem he had recently composed for her. “Like a Mary Magdalene … who appeared by the Seine,” it began, the singer bore on her frail person “all the sorrows of humanity.” His vision of Piaf as a vessel for the divine concludes in praise of her effect on her audience: “When you appear, a pale supplicant / To sing the refrains that we love / The hearts of those who suffer open up to you.”
Though Bourgeat was no Cocteau, he knew how to encourage his Piafou when her spirits were low. By December, she felt well enough to record six more songs in English for Columbia, including the popular “Autumn Leaves,” a tame version of “Je m’en fous pas mal” entitled “I Shouldn’t Care,” and “Don’t Cry,” a translation of her own “C’est d’la faute à tes yeux.” When the future President Eisenhower came to hear her at the Versailles, she performed French folk songs just for him, along with his favorite, “Autumn Leaves.” But at home she was often irritable, especially if Constantine mentioned his wife. By the end of 1950, when she turned thirty-five, Edith was relying increasingly on Bourgeat, Homer, and her many prescription drugs.
When Piaf and her party arrived at Orly early in 1951, they were met by the playwright Marcel Achard. Achard’s plays, peopled by stock figures from the songs he used as titles, had been popular since prewar days, when his modernized versions of commedia dell’arte struck a chord with Paris audiences. Like Piaf, Achard was known as a “spécialiste de l’amour.” For some time he had been writing a play for her, to suit their shared specialty. Entitled La Petite Lili, it took place in Montmartre, where Lili (Piaf’s role) worked in a hat shop while her love affairs unfolded in the songs that Piaf had already written for the production. It was to open in March; the only problem was that Achard had not completed the script.
As the driving force behind the show, Piaf had chosen the director, persuaded Monnot to compose the music, and booked the A.B.C., her favorite Montmartre theater. After reading Achard’s draft, she took advantage of the delay to demand a role for Constantine. The playwright reluctantly wrote him in as a gangster, to accommodate his accent. “He’s a good dancer,” the director observed to a radio host three days before opening night. “Good, that way, he doesn’t have to say much,” the host replied.
La Petite Lili opened on March 10 to an audience in evening dress, a striking contrast to the A.B.C.’s surroundings. The sets evoked familiar Montmartre scenes, from the artisanal hat shop to the hilltop square where Piaf had sung in her pre-môme days. In a wink at the audience, a character remarks that Lili’s life is like “those street songs in which love and death hold hands.” Piaf was outstanding as an early version of herself, the critics wrote: “[She] is a fine comic actress.… Of course the play was written for her, but she also had to like it: it’s clear that she does.” What was more, Constantine’s physique suited his part. The musical was a triumph for Piaf, another wrote: “She proved that she is one of our most sensitive and moving actresses.” Her own songs were applauded, especially “Du matin jusqu’au soir,” which conjugates the verb aimer in each of its tenses, and “Demain il fera jour,” with its promise of new dawns.
Ten days after the opening, the star was rushed to a private clinic for the first of a series of urgent hospitalizations. She recovered from the intestinal problems that would continue to plague her, in time to return to the A.B.C. in April, and to record the songs from Lili—already a popular success thanks to Achard’s nods to Piaf’s, and Montmartre’s, legends. “Demain, il fera jour” became a hit as soon as its inspirational lyrics were heard on the airwaves: “C’est quand tout est perdu / Que tout commence.” (“It’s when everything seems lost / That it all begins again.”) Piaf sang each night for the next three months, interspersing performances at the A.B.C. with more recordings, gala events, and visits to the theater to watch her understudy play Lili. Just when it seemed that she was successfully conjugating the verb aimer in her private life, Constantine announced that he was bringing his wife and daughter to live with him. Edith went into a rage. It was her role to dismiss lovers, not to be left by them.
Years later, after Constantine had established himself as a singer and the star of French films noirs, he admitted that Piaf had helped his career. But he said little about their rapport and did not mention his presence at the séances in which the spirit of Cerdan voiced his approval of Constantine as his successor. The American had taken part in the table-turning “to console her,” one of Piaf’s friends said, “manipulating the table in secret as much to please her as to win her confidence.” Others were less forgiving. He cared only about his success, one of his songwriters said: “Edith never knew about his role at the séances. We did what we could to keep it that way; it was best for everyone.”
When La Petite Lili closed in July, Piaf went on tour with Aznavour and a vivacious young woman named Micheline Dax, whose talents included comedy and whistling. “Edith liked to laugh almost as much as she liked to sing,” Dax recalled. Although the star let on that she had thought of entering a convent after Cerdan’s death, “I could always make her laugh,” Dax added: “There was a complicity between us that outlasted the cast of characters that went in and out of her life.” Along with Chauvigny, Barrier, and the rest of Piaf’s musical family, she also brought on tour a man named Roland Avelys, who performed in a mask as the Nameless Singer. A fixture at her Boulogne house, Avelys became Piaf’s court jester and, like Momone, found ways to fleece his patron. Piaf pretended not to notice when money disappeared. “She wanted him and the others to be happy,” Dax said. “She didn’t mind being robbed as long as those who were doing it amused her.”
Their summer tour was magical, especially evenings in the Roman amphitheaters in towns like Arles. “Edith outdid herself in such places,” Dax wrote, “her unique timbre reaching to the starry sky.” The singer crossed herself before each recital, but once she was onstage, “the crowd, in one voice, acclaimed her with fervent, interminable ovations until at last she smiled, reassured by the love the audience, already won over and grateful for all she would give them, gave to her. The longer she sang the more they came under her spell.… At the end a hymn of gratitude rose up like incense from the crowd, who were overwhelmed by feelings of happiness. One heard not only ‘Bravo,’ but ‘Merci, Edith.’ ” At such times the star was truly happy and fulfilled in the exchange of love.
That summer, a new Monsieur Piaf also came under her spell—a bicycle champion named André Pousse, who would become a well-known actor and artistic director of the Moulin Rouge. Since the inauguration of the Tour de France in 1903, the French had idolized cyclists as national heroes, much like boxers. Pousse had been famous in Paris since the 1940s, when he won the grueling six-day cycling events at the Vélodrome d’Hiver.
To show her love, Piaf gave the cyclist gifts just like those that Constantine had received and promised to forgo alcohol—a vow she was unable to keep, in part because of the two automobile accidents that she was involved in that year. On July 21, Aznavour lost control of their car on the way to Deauville, where she sang the next night with her arm in a sling. Three weeks later, when Pousse missed a turn, she suffered a badly broken arm and fractured ribs. Rushed to Paris for surgery, she stayed in the hospital till the end of August, then went home with her left arm immobilized and a craving for the morphine
that had been prescribed to manage her distress.
Looked after by her Boulogne “family,” she regained her strength over the next few months but found it impossible to do without morphine, then as now a palliative for intense pain. “It was essential for my body,” Piaf wrote years later. “I was addicted.” Over the next year, until she underwent a cure, members of her entourage procured the drug for her. “I was earning millions; the drug dealers knew this and took advantage. I saw strange, disturbing people come into my apartment. I knew that they were robbing me, that they were exploiting my weakness, but I couldn’t put up any resistance.” Intimates like Dax, Monnot, and Barrier came to see her daily and did what they could to protect her, often to no avail.
By autumn, Piaf was able to do a star turn in a film called Paris chante toujours (she sang “Hymne à l’amour”). She also recorded six new songs, including three by Aznavour that showed her emotional range and his understanding of it: the lilting “Plus bleu que le bleu de tes yeux” (with its insider’s allusion to her love of blue eyes), a satiric send-up of traditional bourgeois Sundays called “Je hais les dimanches,” and a torrid tale of obssessive love, “Jézebel.” Another new song written to order for her, “Padam … padam,” by Contet and Glanzberg, mimed the singer’s possession by the melody that would continue to haunt her: it became one of Piaf’s greatest successes.
In November, a journalist praised her performance of “Padam” at her next stint at the A.B.C.: “Edith has found an extraordinary gesture which is not the sign of the cross. She hits herself hard on the forehead and chest; the audience shudders.” The star seemed to be telling her own story: “Ecoutez le chahut qu’il me fait / Padam … padam … padam … / Comme si tout mon passé défilait / Padam … padam … padam … / Faut garder du chagrin pour après / J’en ai tout un solfège sur cet air qui bat / Qui bat comme un coeur de bois.” (“Listen to it shake me / As if my whole life was marching by / I’ll give in to sorrow later / Note by note I parse this air that pounds / That pounds like a hardened heart.”)
That winter, as Piaf sang of being possessed by music, the cast of characters in Boulogne went through changes. Marc and Danielle Bonel legalized their union; Danielle began to manage Edith’s chaotic household. After some violent fights, the singer broke with Pousse. His colleague Louis (“Toto”) Gérardin, who held major French cycling trophies, replaced Pousse in her affections, despite his status as a married man. Momone left suddenly, taking with her Edith’s souvenirs of Cerdan—personal papers, clothes, jewelry, and other gifts that she had given him and, since his death, preserved like relics. Devastated by her friend’s treachery—Momone presented some of Cerdan’s effects to her own lover and sold the rest—Edith declared that she could never forgive her.
The day before her birthday, the star had another shock. At Alice Gérardin’s urging, the police came to Boulogne in search of the Gérardins’ missing possessions, including Toto’s trophies and eighteen kilos of gold bars. Although Edith was cleared of any misdeed, the scandal landed her back in the pages of Détective, as if fifteen years of consummate professionalism since the Leplée affair counted for nothing. For the popular press she was a husband-stealer, “the George Sand of the twentieth century.” Like the novelist known for her love affairs, Piaf was said to be strangely seductive: “From her frail person emanates a magnetism that envelops, subjugates, conquers, ravishes.” Her troubles with men, the journalist implied, were the lot of the “extraordinary woman.”
Even though the press thought that Edith’s relations with Toto had ended with the return of the gold bars, she kept hoping that they might be regularized. Her “ange bleu” (his eyes were the shade of blue she loved) had shown her that she was a passionate woman. During a separation she wrote, “No-one has ever made love to me as much as you do.… How I’ll miss your body, your beautiful thighs and soft skin, your adorable ass.” She would do whatever he wished, she wrote some weeks later: “Think of Joan of Arc, who would have believed that a simple woman would do such great things. She did it for the love of God, I’ll do it for you.” In another letter she fantasized about “lying between your beautiful thighs with my head on Popol … letting my dreams come true.” Hoping they might have a child, she again vowed to stop drinking. But their rendezvous had to be discreet since his wife’s detectives were still on the job: “The more difficult our love is,” she said, speaking as much to herself as to Toto, “the more beautiful it will be!”
Meanwhile, Edith dedicated each performance of her hit song “Plus bleu que le bleu de tes yeux” to her “blue angel.” (An avid movie fan, she may have associated Gérardin with Dietrich’s role as the temptress in The Blue Angel—an intriguing gender reversal.) Some time later, with greater sympathy than the journalist who wrote that Piaf’s tangled love life was the lot of the “extraordinary” woman, her friend René Rouzaud observed, “This exceptional being had the right to an exceptional life without our standing in judgment. And if the tradition of French chanson was enriched by her love affairs, we should only be grateful.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
1952–1956
Hoping to put the past behind her, Edith sold her house in Boulogne and moved to an interim rental in the seventeeth arrondissement. The highest-paid French entertainer in her category, she still often spent more than she earned and for this reason multiplied professional engagements. In the spring of 1952, she was so busy that there were few opportunities to join Toto at the out-of-the-way hotels they frequented to elude the press. While touring the south of France with Aznavour, Avelys, and a group called Les Garçons de la Rue, Edith no doubt spent time with Tony Frank in Marseille during her ten-day stint at the Théâtre des Variétés. But soon after her return to Paris, she told a reporter that it was the only place for her. The city that she had celebrated in song after song claimed her heart, “especially now,” she said with a smile, that she had met a man for whom she might give up her career. His predecessor, she added, had been “a mistake.” What she did not say was that, although her rapport with this new man seemed promising, she was hedging her bets by continuing her liaison with her previous lover, albeit in private.
Edith’s run of romantic mistakes let her see that she had gone from one lover to another to anesthetize herself after the death of Cerdan. Over the next months, while dallying with Gérardin, she came to appreciate the man whose presence in her life would bring stability—the singer Jacques Pills, known in the United States as “Monsieur Charm.” They had been acquainted since prewar days, when Pills, né René Ducos, was part of the duo Pills and Tabet. He had recently been divorced from Lucienne Boyer; five years earlier in New York Piaf had remet Cerdan in their company. They belonged to the same world.
Shortly after Piaf’s move to her new apartment, Pills and his young pianist, Gilbert Bécaud, called to offer her their latest song, “Je t’ai dans la peau” (“I’ve Got You Under My Skin”). The frank sensuality of the lyrics (“J’ai froid, j’ai chaud / Je sens la fièvre sur ma peau” [“I’m hot, I’m cold / I feel the fever on my skin”]) appealed to her, as did the older of the two men (Pills was forty-six). “Jacques came back the next day and each day after that,” Piaf said discreetly: “We had to rehearse the song, work on it, perfect it!”
By June, the singers were preparing their joint appearance at the Drap d’Or club, Piaf’s way of announcing that they were an item. On the eleventh, Edouard Herriot, the head of the French National Assembly, awarded her the Grand Prix du Disque for “Padam … padam” at a ceremony attended by the writer Colette, perhaps at the urging of their mutual friend, Cocteau. Piaf and Pills took a brief vacation at the home of a Mr. Frank (Tony?) in Marseille, where they announced their engagement before going on tour for the summer. In September, Piaf rented the nine-room apartment on the Boulevard Lannes, opposite the Bois de Boulogne, where she would live like a Gypsy for the rest of her life—as far from Belleville as one could go and still be in Paris.
The singers flew to New York in early
September, in time for Pills’s debut at a club aptly named La Vie en Rose and Piaf’s fifth engagement at the Versailles. Two weeks later, she informed Gérardin of her wedding plans: she planned to be faithful to Pills, whom she loved sincerely. Marlene Dietrich helped Edith choose the blue gown and bonnet that she wore on September 20 to the Saint Vincent de Paul Church in New York, where the union was blessed by the priest who had comforted her after the death of Cerdan. Despite the press’s attempts to cover the event, only Les Compagnons (then in New York), the French consul, and Piaf’s entourage were allowed into the church. With Marlene as maid of honor, Edith walked down the aisle to Schubert’s “Ave Maria.” Loulou Barrier gave her away; Danielle Bonel tucked a white mink bolero over her shoulders as they set off to Le Pavillon, where the guests—Ginou Richer, Dietrich, Aznavour, Barrier, Chauvigny, the manager of the Versailles, and the Bonels—toasted the newlyweds.
That night at the Versailles the couple sang the teasing duet that Piaf had composed for them, “Et ça gueule, ça, madame”—whose lyrics reflected their amorous byplay. The next night, they appeared on Ed Sullivan’s television show The Toast of the Town; two weeks later, Life ran a two-page article entitled “Mlle. Heartbreak: Singer Edith Piaf Finds ‘La Vie’ Can Be ‘Rosy,’ ” with a full-page montage of Edith singing. “I’m truly happy,” Edith told Bourgeat. “The better I know Jacques the more I appreciate him. You so much hoped to see me be calm. Now I am.” Pills’s reputation meant that, unlike previous partners, he would not become a rival. “I don’t think she was deeply in love with Pills,” a friend said, “but she was very fond of him. He was charming, handsome, a good companion. She could trust him. It was … more of an amitié amoureuse than a great passion.” At this point, an amorous friendship offered the balance she needed.
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