There were also the new chansonniers who wrote and performed their own songs, among them Georges Brassens, Léo Ferré, and Jacques Brel. Piaf admired each for his way of extending the tradition. Brassens’s bawdy poems on the lives of working people and his carnal singing style gave what was called the nouvelle chanson an idiom that spoke to the young, as did her friend Ferré’s subversive lyrics about gutter denizens, which were sometimes banned from the radio on charges of obscenity. Piaf also thought highly of Brel’s dark cadences, his way of turning each song into a brief drama that moved audiences at all levels of society while remaining intensely lyrical, an approach that owed much to her own.
Since the late 1940s, the jazz clubs in the Latin Quarter and Saint-Germain had shifted nightlife from Pigalle to the Left Bank, until an enterprising cabaret director reopened Cocteau’s old nightspot on the Right Bank, Le Boeuf sur le Toit. Unable to afford a star like Piaf, he had invented one, the sultry, saucy Juliette Gréco, whose on- and offstage nonchalance intrigued well-heeled audiences. Since then, Gréco, the muse of Jean-Paul Sartre’s circle in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, had come to epitomize the mood of postwar youth.
Some even said that Gréco was “the new Piaf.” Like Piaf, the young woman performed in black, but instead of a dress, she wore the “existentialist” uniform, a turtleneck sweater and pants. A few years before, Piaf had flown into a rage on learning that Gréco was singing Aznavour’s “Je hais les dimanches” (“I Hate Sundays”), even though she had rejected it when he first brought it to her. Piaf began performing the song “to show that existentialist how to sing.” After recording her own version of Dréjac’s “Sous le ciel de Paris” once Gréco had popularized it, Piaf announced that she would not share “her” composers with the singer; Gréco let on that though she admired some of Piaf’s songs, she did not like her as a person.
In this context, Piaf feared that, like Chevalier, she had become a kind of national monument. She need not have worried, even if her lyrics-of-the-people tradition was one “in which the slightest exaggeration makes you look ridiculous,” as the Figaro littéraire’s music critic observed after seeing her at the Olympia. In the past, Fréhel and Yvonne George had hit just the right note, he continued, but few apart from Piaf could carry on the tradition. The public always knew if a singer was faking it, but “no such fears with Piaf.… She wins us over with the first refrain.”
To the amazement of Edith’s intimates, her onstage mastery still hit them right in the heart. Micheline Dax, who had toured with her for years, watched the star from the first row at the Olympia: glued to her seat, she had to mop her tears with her handkerchief by the end of the show. “She had that effect even on those closest to her,” Marc Bonel said. “She was like a medium, she had the whole hall in her hands.… You have Chaplin, Sarah Bernhardt, Fernandel: she was of that order.”
Piaf’s celebrity was such that she became a regular guest on television programs in honor of others, like Gilbert Bécaud. For her international audiences she recorded four more songs in English, including “Heaven Have Mercy” (“Miséricorde”) and “I Shouldn’t Care” (“Je m’en fous pas mal”), before leaving on a summer tour with the Cerdans and Jacques Liébrard, her guitarist and lover. Piaf’s onstage reunions with Pills in Le Lavandou and Biarritz, booked before they decided to divorce, took place amicably, but a painful scene disrupted her stay in Saint-Raphaël, when Liébrard’s “wife” threw herself at Piaf and called her a thief of other women’s husbands. Despite this confrontation, which fed the gutter press’s increasingly sensational accounts of her love life, she and Liébrard resumed their affair after flying to New York in September for Piaf’s seventh engagement at the Versailles.
Ed Sullivan welcomed her back to his show a few weeks later. That night, she sang “La Goualante du pauvre Jean” and “L’Homme à la moto,” demonstrating her ease in these strikingly different traditions, and responding easily to Sullivan’s humor (when she translated the first song as “The Poor People of Paris,” he asked her to sing to “the poor people of New York”). Each night at the Versailles, she smashed one of the crystal goblets that she used as stage props in “Les Amants d’un jour” to turn the nightclub into the shabby hotel of the song—until the management asked her to stop because of the cost. Booked in the States for the next six months, she hoped to return to Paris in April 1957 for a rest, “something I’ve never had,” she told Bourgeat. She had a surprise that revealed how much he had helped her: “I’m a millionaire.… You so much hoped I could start saving, well, I’ve begun. Do I astound you? I think I owe this to the being who is so close to me and surrounds me with such unconditional love.”
Edith often reread Bourgeat’s account of Rosicrucianism, a source of solace that she kept among her private papers. That autumn of 1956, she was initiated into the order under the guidance of Marc Bonel, who had joined in 1954. “It helped her to relax,” Bonel said. Being a member did not require much discipline, he added: “It’s enough to read the monographs … in the proper sequence to face life’s problems serenely.” No doubt at Piaf’s urging, her intimates, including Liébrard, followed her example.
In mid-November, Piaf and her entourage began the extended tour that would crisscross North America that winter, starting in Quebec, and in the following spring take her back to South America. After Quebec, they flew to Dallas for two weeks, then to Los Angeles for a return engagement at the Mocambo (one wonders if she found time to see Brando). Already on the verge of collapse by the end of the year, she managed to record “My Own Merry-Go-Round” (“Mon Manège à moi”) and “If You Love Me” (“Hymne à l’amour”) at Capitol Records’ Los Angeles studios for an album that would include all of her songs in English.
By the start of 1957, Piaf’s fatigue was so great that she felt “a sort of confusion … a total lack of balance,” she told Bourgeat—a condition that she hoped to overcome by working twice as hard, so that she could afford to take a long rest. Though grateful for Liébrard’s support, she missed her mentor: “The older I get, the more I understand how rare friendship is; if only you knew how precious yours is to me.”
After concerts in Washington and Philadelphia, she was booked for her second Carnegie Hall recital on January 13. Despite her poor health (sinusitis, bronchitis, a high fever), she refused to heed the doctor who told her to cancel: “I didn’t bring you here for that,” she raged. “Your job is to give me an injection so I can last two hours onstage.” With the support of Bonel, Liébrard, and the forty local musicians and singers, she lasted an hour and forty minutes, giving the audience some of her best songs in English: “Lovers for a Day,” “Heaven Have Mercy,” “Happy,” “The Highway”; she sang “La Vie en rose” in both languages and the rest of her repertoire in French. Piaf’s recital, a matter of national pride, was relayed to France, including her remark to the broadcaster after the final curtain, “I had the worst stage fright of my entire life!”
The star followed her Carnegie Hall triumph with engagements in Montreal, Chicago, and Havana, then flew back to New York in February for a month at the Empire Room. On her nights off, she took in Broadway musicals and listened to her favorites, Judy Garland and Billie Holiday. Unable to overcome her exhaustion, she asked Bourgeat to send her books on spirituality as a cure for her “disequilibrium,” the unbalanced state maintained with tranquilizers, mood elevators, and drugs for pain that helped her keep the grueling pace she had set herself. In particular, she wanted Allan Kardec’s works on the science of Spiritism (his coinage) to supplement her Rosicrucian readings.
Piaf told Bourgeat that she meant to “study spiritual science seriously this time, without being blinded by grief or surrounded by exploitative bastards,” in a letter scolding him when she did not find the books she had requested on her return to a brief rest in New York. That spring, she maintained an even more dizzying pace, flying to Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro in May for extended engagements. In São Paulo, on learning that her divorce from Pills had be
come final, she told Bourgeat how much she missed “Paname” (Paris).
The books on Spiritism finally caught up with her in San Francisco, where she sang two shows a night at the Fairmont Hotel in June. It is unlikely that she had time for study, but she did take a day off to travel south, past the region’s apricot orchards, to San Jose, to visit the Egyptianate Rosicrucian Temple with Liébrard and the Bonels. That day, they were all welcomed as brothers and sisters of the AMORC (Ancient and Mystical Order Rosae Crucis). Marc Bonel reflected, “She was seeking a philosophy designed to avoid harm and give protection, a peaceful way to love.”
About this time, Piaf found another unexpected source of renewal, in a melody that accompanied her throughout her travels that year. This mesmerizing thirties tune, which she first heard in Argentina, proved to be Angel Cabral’s “Que nadie sepa mi sufrir,” a vals criollo, or Peruvian waltz, with a fast, light tempo that belied its lyrics on the pain of love. In August, after a return engagement in Hollywood, she flew back to Paris with Bourgeat’s books and Cabral’s score, spirituality and music being complementary paths to the “profound peace” she sought even when embarking on new adventures.
“After Jacques [Pills], my long pursuit of love began again,” Piaf said a few years later. “But it was as if I had been playing blind man’s buff,” she reflected, perhaps remembering the sense of helplessness she had known as a child. But if she wore a blindfold where love was concerned, she was clairvoyant when it came to music. After Monnot heard Cabral’s waltz and said that she wished she had composed it, Piaf acquired the rights. That autumn, during the long-awaited rest she had promised herself, the star had time to absorb the musical genres encountered on her travels—American blues and jazz, Mexican mariachis, Latin love songs. But it was the Peruvian waltz that stayed with her, inspiring her vision of an updated repertoire for the changed musical scene in France. One day, the lyricist Michel Rivgauche brought her his adaptation of the American folk song “Allentown Jail” (called “Les Prisons du roi”), which she adopted on the spot. As he was leaving, she gave him Cabral’s score and asked him for lyrics to suit the tempo, the alternations of strong and weak beats that give the waltz its intoxicating sway.
Rivgauche returned with lyrics that suited both the melody and Piaf’s persona, that of the woman who finds love only to see it vanish before her eyes. His poem imagines a couple brought together in the crush of a Paris street crowd—as on a simmering Quatorze Juillet. The woman first evokes the euphoric atmosphere: “Je revois la ville en fête et en délire / Suffoquant sous le soleil et sous la joie / Et j’entends dans la musique les cris, les rires / Qui éclatent et rebondissent autour de moi.” (“I see the delirious city at play / Choked with joy and with the sun / In the music I hear cries and laughter / That explode all round me and rebound.”)
Piaf recorded this mesmerizing song, “La Foule,” along with “Les Prisons du roi,” in preparation for her return to the Olympia in the new year, following a brief tour of French leading cities. Meanwhile, she engaged a singer named Félix Marten as her vedette américaine, the last act on the first half of the program, even though she did not think much of his repertoire. In November, she told France Dimanche that Jacques Liébrard was the love of her life, but soon, on learning that he had slept with her secretary, banished the guitarist from the Boulevard Lannes and from her company. She was already looking to Marten as his replacement.
In December, Piaf joined the cast of Marcel Blistène’s new film, Les Amants de demain. Playing an unhappy woman who finds peace in prison with the man she loves after killing her brutish husband, she performed four songs, including the saccharine title number and the poignant lullaby “Les Neiges de Finlande,” whose lyrics affirmed her love of fairy tales. Piaf allowed that, though she liked making movies, she preferred the music-hall—because there, “you’re in charge of everything, you make all your own decisions.”
In the new year, she began making choices for her engagement at the Olympia. Repeating the same process as with Montand and other protégés, she worked closely with Marten, a tall, good-looking man with a cynical air, to bring out his tender side by teaching him love songs, a genre he had never attempted. Piaf’s wish to be in charge came out in force during rehearsals. Marten must move his arms naturally, she shouted; he must feel the ballad written for him by Rivgauche, a declaration of love that began: “Je veux te dire: je t’aime, je t’aime, mon amour.” Despite Marten’s reluctance, understandable given that he was married and the song was addressed to Edith, he rose to the occasion on opening night, February 6, 1958, and earned good reviews.
But it was not Marten that the star-studded crowd (including Juliette Gréco) came to see. When Piaf appeared onstage, Le Monde’s critic wrote, “an ear-splitting sound, a long salvo of applause, literally glued her to the microphone.… Whatever people say, whatever she does, Edith Piaf generates a flood of enthusiasm. Is it art, science, genius? Anything one could write about her is eclipsed by this perpetual miracle.” Her opening number, “Mon Manège à moi,” treating love as a merry-go-round, suited her, the critic added, but it was “La Foule” that revealed her genius.
Decades later, we can imagine this moment, the culmination of her mature style, with the aid of contemporary film clips and reviews. Standing under the spotlight with her eyes half closed, Piaf mimed the throng’s ebb and flow with her arms. Only her face, her heart-shaped neckline, and those fluttering, swaying hands were visible. Her eyes opened; she sang the packed phrases of the first stanza in a trance but with impeccable diction and phrasing. Onstage yet out in the street, she seemed to lose her bearings until the last line of the opening bars, when the crowd thrusts her into the arms of a stranger.
With each line we hear the throng’s cries in her husky tones; with each throb of her vibrato we feel the couple borne along by forces greater than themselves. Like the newfound lovers, the spectators become “one body” (“un seul corps”). All of us—singer, musicians, audience—are caught in the rapturous waltz (“folle farandole”) filling the hall as she sings of her bliss: “Nos deux corps enlacés s’envolent / Et retombent tous deux, / Epanouis, enivrés, et heureux.” (“Our bodies entwined soar / And together alight, / Intoxicated, radiant, happy.”) Living fully within the music, she reveals her listeners to themselves.
Like many of Piaf’s songs, “La Foule” stages love’s appearances and disappearances, but it does so more theatrically than most. In the next refrain, the throng wrenches the couple apart; Piaf sweeps the air impotently with her arm and, clenching her fists, curses the crowd that gave her this gift, then snatched it away: “Et je crispe mes poings / Maudissant la foule qui me vole / L’homme qu’elle m’avait donné / Et que je n’ai jamais retrouvé.” From the start, the song’s swaying rhythms foreshadowed the tug of forces beyond her control as well as her dream of happiness. Piaf’s concert was, Le Monde concluded, “the triumph of art for art’s sake, an exceptional, unequaled success before which even the most skeptical must bow.”
Edith could not bear to be without a man for long. A new candidate for her affections was at hand in Félix Marten. Still, while drawing him into her circle, she was also having an affair with the art dealer André Schoeller and flirting with the photographer Hugues Vassal. That winter, Edith’s private life resembled a French farce, with men stashed in different rooms of her apartment, and accomplices pressed into service to keep them from meeting. Edith enjoyed each man’s company, while playing them against one another as if it were just a game.
Marten, although reluctant to give himself completely to Piaf, saw the advantages in a liaison with the star. As his mentor, she intended to to leaven his mocking air with a touch of charm: “He should sing the way Cary Grant acts in movies, with a sort of tender irony,” she told the broadcaster who interviewed them together. One can hear her trying to convince herself that Marten had more going for him than was apparent: “I think he has personality. No, I don’t think so, I’m sure.” Marten stayed until the
end of her extended Olympia run but did not play a big part in Piaf’s life: “Like so many others,” a friend observed, “he passed through like a comet.”
André Schoeller, who was also married, had long had a crush on Piaf. This suave young man—he was twenty-nine and she forty-two when they met—became her lover in the winter of 1958. Schoeller, known as “Dédé,” introduced Piaf to modern art; it became her passion. Her entourage thought that she lacked much feeling for the Russian abstractionist Lanskoy, but his work appeared in her salon thanks to Schoeller’s enthusiasm for the artist. They tried to be discreet about their liaison by going out in public with her entourage, but one night Schoeller hid in an armoire when Marten showed up. Edith was always in good spirits, Schoeller recalled: she drank only Carlsberg beer, and took mood stabilizers but no other drugs. “She was a healthy woman,” he insisted in the face of myths about her addictions. What was more, “With her I encountered love in all its splendor, its purity. That’s what it was, splendor, she had that in her, you saw it each time she sang.… I loved talking to her, sleeping with her, I loved her company. With her you became more than yourself.”
If Piaf’s romantic nature prevailed in trysts with Schoeller, it was her mischievous side that had won Hugues Vassal’s heart the previous year, when France Dimanche sent him to photograph her in Dijon. Sizing up the skinny twenty-four-year-old, the star asked him to help her by telling Liébrard to disappear while she dined with Marten and, since he looked as if he would appreciate a meal, invited him to join them. On Vassal’s return to Paris, he became part of the group that gathered nightly at the Boulevard Lannes to wait for Edith to appear from her bedroom; meanwhile, they were served dinner by Suzanne and took their places in the salon. “Thanks to this little circle,” Vassal wrote, “Edith could finally play the part of the spoiled child, a priceless luxury for a woman whose past had been marked by so much drama.” With the group, he watched the parade of men who at various times slept in her bed: “We were there to help, in silence, to give her our support—that was our only merit, one that didn’t cost much, since the mere fact that Edith relied on us was recompense enough.”
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