No Regrets

by Carolyn Burke

  Vassal became the star’s favorite photographer—her confidant and co-conspirator in the press’s handling of her many crises over the next six years. Their intimacy grew, but it remained platonic: he too was married and greatly in awe of her, yet able to see the benefit she derived from the younger men who made her feel revitalized. Although none of them had all the qualities that she desired, each had something to offer—provided he took it on her terms, as an unpredictable ride on life’s carousel.

  The star’s Olympia engagement was the event of the 1958 winter season. The hall was full each night; people had to be turned away. When Bruno Coquatrix, the director, begged Edith to extend for another five weeks, she agreed—since her love affair with the public mattered more to her than her private life or her fragile health, which she liked to play down. After collapsing onstage in April, Piaf told the press that though doing three shows on Sundays tired her, she could not disappoint “the Sunday crowd.” She added, “They deserve more than the others. All week they dream of Sunday.” When Coquatrix again begged her to extend her run, she agreed to three more weeks. By the end of the engagement, she had performed 128 times for some two hundred and forty thousand spectators, and was back on a regimen of stimulants, barbiturates, and sleeping pills, followed each day by many cups of black coffee. “She wasn’t an addict, but she had pushed her luck for so long,” her manager said. “She needed stimulants to go on, tranquilizers to go to sleep. She wore herself out that way.”

  In May, Piaf returned to Sweden with a suitcase full of pills and an entourage consisting of Loulou Barrier, Ginou Richer, and the star’s new lover, the twenty-five-year-old Jo (later Georges) Moustaki, an Alexandrine Greek who had moved to Paris as a youth. They had met that February, when the songwriter came to her apartment with his latest compositions. Moustaki’s shy charm made such an impression that she invited him to stay after her other guests went home; she beguiled him by playing the jazz songs she had brought back from the United States. “I was fascinated, I had no idea that a singer from another time might share my taste in music, which drew us together,” Moustaki recalled. By May, he had replaced the other men in her life. Combining her familiar roles as mentor, lover, and collaborator, Edith hoped to find the inspiration that she longed for in a relationship—love being the prerequisite and open-sesame to her creative renewal.

  The star was so taken with her young lover that she paid little attention to upheavals in France. Since April, when the government fell, the warring political parties had been unable to form a coalition. A provisional cabinet was named in May. At the army’s urging, De Gaulle announced that he would take charge. In one of those odd coincidences, Piaf fell ill onstage in Stockholm on May 28, the day that the provisional cabinet resigned, and the next day flew to Paris in a chartered plane just as De Gaulle took power. Rather than focus on the crisis, the popular weekly Noir et Blanc ran a photo of the singer looking like the Madonna under the headline “Edith Piaf Gravement Malade?” (“Is Edith Piaf Gravely Ill?”).

  With Moustaki and her entourage, she spent part of June recovering at the country house that she had recently bought near Paris. Moustaki tried to limit her drinking, but Ginou kept her supplied: “It was not exactly a dry period,” the younger woman recalled. About this time, Piaf wrote to Schoeller, who was on vacation in the Alps: she was bored, she missed his laughter. What she did not say was that her fatigue was still so great that she was battling depression. When the reporter Jean Noli came to interview her for France Dimanche, she declared, “If one day I can’t sing, I think I’ll shoot myself.” The best antidote for depression was music that refreshed her spirit. Moustaki’s new songs, “Eden Blues” and “Le Gitan et la fille,” were like a tonic, she continued—“full of the sun, faraway islands, passionate love.”

  By July, Edith felt well enough to go on tour for the summer with her young lover. Snapshots of them on the beach at Cannes show Moustaki serenading her and Piaf laughing. One day, in a restaurant, she proposed ideas for songs that he could write for her: among them, a love affair in London on a gloomy Sunday. He jotted the word milord (“my lord”) on a paper napkin; Piaf circled it and told him to start from there. He drafted a lyric; she suggested changes and sent the results to Monnot. Some weeks later, the composer came to Edith’s country house with two different melodies. The women preferred one, but Moustaki liked the other, which reminded him of music he had heard in bars in Alexandria; Piaf accepted his choice.

  Their song, which revived the whore-with-a-heart-of-gold trope, became one of her greatest successes. “‘Milord’ was typical of its time,” Moustaki explained, “with a marked contrast between verse and refrain, major and minor passages, waltz, Charleston, and fox-trot rhythms—like a classical composition with different movements.” Piaf had the gift, he said years later, “of knowing how to nourish creativity in others.”

  Though the young man’s sense of popular music was acute, he was not, in Piaf’s opinion, ready to perform his own songs. During a joint radio broadcast, she interrupted his rendition of one of them to show how it should be done. “You have to give more of yourself,” she said. “When we come back from America … you’ll be ready, but until then it’s better not to think of performing.” In time, Moustaki understood that Piaf had been as demanding with him as she was with herself. “She wanted to be the best,” he observed, “not from ambition but as her calling, a somewhat mystical sense that she couldn’t do things by halves. Onstage you gave everything; when singing you kept nothing for yourself; when writing you didn’t stop until you had given your best.”

  Piaf recorded two of Moustaki’s songs a few days before they were to fly to New York, in September, for her second engagement at the Empire Room. Driving to Paris from the country the day before their flight (Moustaki at the wheel, Piaf beside him), they hit a large truck head-on. The star was rushed to the hospital. She had lost consciousness, two tendons in her arm were severed, her lip had to be sutured. The U.S. trip was canceled.

  A month later, after her convalescence in the country, they had a second accident at the same spot, with Moustaki again at the wheel. At first Edith seemed to be relatively unharmed—she managed to appear at Aznavour’s opening night at the Alhambra, with Moustaki at her side—but she had to spend the autumn recovering from the two accidents. They were a warning from heaven, she believed, and her survival was “a miracle.” By the new year, her lip, which was healing slowly, still hurt when she opened her mouth wide. “My life is over,” she told France Dimanche. “I can’t sing any more; I can’t bite into the words.” But, with her entourage in the wings, she bit into “Milord” at a test recital in Rouen. The standing ovation for Moustaki’s song convinced her that she had been right about his talent. After a series of concerts in France, Tunis, and Algiers, she felt ready to fly to the United States on January 6, 1959.

  Moustaki had little to do but observe Piaf’s New York life there. He had the satisfaction of hearing her sing “The Gypsy and the Lady,” an English version of his “Le Gitan et la fille,” when Ed Sullivan welcomed her back to his program in January as “the most amazing ninety-seven pounds in show business.” This operatic cry, in the voice of a Gypsy who begs his love to let him prove his devotion, may have given the young man pause, especially when she intoned, “No price is too high.” Yet Edith was being an angel, Barrier told Bourgeat: “She’s made a marvelous comeback, and as a result I now feel quite optimistic about her 1959 U.S. season.”

  Looking back, Moustaki recalled that onstage the star was transfigured. “She could breathe there, she was at home, she constructed her own world. If she felt ill in the wings, she felt better once she went on. She couldn’t not sing. All she cared about was her songs. Nothing else.” They composed together as a means of communication, and because she wanted to transmit her art—to stimulate him to write and, when the time came, perform. “She wanted songs that were poems set to music,” he recalled. One of these, with Piaf’s words and Moustaki’s music, was never
recorded. Its lyric, “On est malheureux / Quand on aime vraiement” (“You’re unhappy / When you’re really in love”), speaks for itself.

  Five days after Piaf’s triumphant return to the Empire Room on January 25, they quarreled. Moustaki left for Florida the next day; Edith wrote to André Schoeller, “It’s over.… It had to end some time, you were right, all too right. Here I am without a man. I think it’s the first time this has happened to me.” She had not told him about Moustaki until then because of her scruples, “but this time I was wrong!” After finishing the letter, she implored her manager: “Loulou, trouve-moi quelqu’un de gentil” (“Loulou, find me somebody nice”).

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  1959–1960

  Whether or not they knew French, Piaf’s audiences at the Empire Room responded viscerally to the chanteuse. “Edith Piaf never lets you down,” a critic wrote after her opening. Her voice “hits you right in the heart. It is pulsating, penetrating, like no other I’ve heard. There were times when Piaf, in all her power, sounded like an organ and a whole orchestra combined.” New Yorkers hung on her every word as she sang the rapturous “La Foule,” which he called “a sad tale of a girl who lost her lover in a crowd.” Like most of her songs, it seemed to come straight out of her life. “As I look back through years of night clubbing,” the critic concluded, “I realize there are only a few genuine artists among the performers.… Edith Piaf is among the few, if not the only one.”

  Loulou Barrier must have been relieved when a nice young man of the sort that Edith asked him to find showed up at her stage door soon after Moustaki’s departure. Douglas Davis, a fresh-faced Southern portraitist who hoped to start a celebrity series with a likeness of the singer, had studied at the Grande Chaumière art academy in Paris. While there, he had fallen in love with Edith’s voice, he said; it was the most beautiful he had ever heard. The star agreed to sit for the young man, whose French was as good as his manners. Each afternoon, as Davis worked on her portrait, he told her tales of life in Atlanta, where he first studied art: one of his commissions had been a painting of Jesus surrounded by children of all races, for a Baptist church.

  Edith’s entourage wagered that “Dougy” would soon replace Moustaki. At thirty, the artist was just thirteen years younger than Piaf, and though he lacked machismo (they assumed that he was gay), “it was as if homosexuality didn’t matter,” Danielle Bonel recalled. “Provided the person didn’t wear high heels or feather boas, she ignored it.” What was more, Edith was charmed by Doug’s attentions (he brought her violets). She began appearing in public with him as her new companion.

  Within a short time, their romance was interrupted by the deterioration of her health. On February 16, she ran from the stage to the bathroom, spat up blood, and fainted. The doctor who examined her concluded that she had a bleeding ulcer caused by the quantity of medicines she took for her arthritis and other ailments. Two days later, she felt well enough to sing, but again left the Empire Room in mid-performance. On February 24, after two blood transfusions, she was taken to Presbyterian Hospital because the ulcer was still hemorrhaging. Her surgeon operated immediately. “She’s indomitable,” Barrier wrote Bourgeat. “This morning she was teasing the doctors.… No fear whatsoever. Last night she chatted until 3 a.m., like a parakeet.”

  The operation was successful, but the star had to be hospitalized for a month. When she regained consciousness, Edith smiled at Danielle Bonel and said to tell their friends in France not to worry. Noir et blanc informed readers that Piaf longed to see Paris again and ran another photo of the star in a Madonna-like mantle, her hands folded in prayer. Maurice Chevalier did his best to cheer her but worried just the same: “Our little giant is going through a dark time,” he wrote in his journal after a visit. Moustaki rushed back from Florida to find a stuffed animal named Douglas by Edith’s side and its namesake in attendance. Following a second operation, in March, Edith stayed in the hospital for another month. With the loss of revenue from the Empire Room and the cost of her care, her New York stay had become a financial disaster. Yet, with her usual lack of interest in such things, she told a visitor, “The greater one’s suffering, the greater one’s joy.… There’s always a bit of blue sky somewhere.”

  Piaf weighed just under eighty pounds when she left the hospital in April. She would soon resume her career, she told the journalists awaiting her appearance. By May, she found the strength to perform in Washington (to pay her hospital bills) and Montreal (for airplane tickets to France), while also making television appearances. “Edith Piaf’s recent serious illness has not left scars on her artistry,” the New York Times wrote when she sang a rousing “Padam” for the “Springtime in Paris” evening on The Voice of Firestone. “Of course it was not nearly enough,” the critic continued, “but it did serve to give reassurance that the chanteuse has lost none of [her] dramatic intensity.” And, despite her anger at Moustaki, who flew to Paris after telling her that he wanted to be his own man, she performed “Milord” on the May 31 Ed Sullivan show, ending her former lover’s composition with vigorous sweeps of her hands and spirited clapping—as if to mark her return to full self-command.

  By June, Edith felt well enough to appear at Carnegie Hall as honorary chair of a jazz concert to benefit the Sidney Bechet Cancer Fund following the musician’s recent death. The next day, she flew to Atlanta with Doug Davis to meet his parents. “She was very frail, she took pills all day long,” Doug’s sister Darlene recalled years later, still touched by Edith’s endearing ways. On learning that the girl from the Paris slums had always wanted to pick a ripe peach, the family took her to an orchard. “That was her heart’s delight,” Darlene continued. Entranced by Doug’s Southern drawl, which had come back in force, and his devotion—a new experience for her in amorous relations—Edith told Marguerite Monnot, “There was so much love in his eyes … one would die for it. It’s a pure, ineffable, unreal kind of love.”

  The press was waiting when the couple stepped off the plane at Orly on June 20. “What have you brought from America?” they asked. Piaf’s reply—“An American!”—prompted the usual speculation about her love life, including a gossipy piece entitled “Piaf Likes ’Em Either Very Tall or Very Strong.” (At six feet three, Davis topped the list of the very tall.) “This tiny little woman likes to feel protected,” the article concluded. In a more serious vein, Piaf explained that with Davis she at last understood “that a man could give me something even before knowing me.… When I was in hospital he spent two hours on the subway every day to bring me violets and chocolates.… I hope that this is the real thing.”

  The singer’s tenderhearted companion was “exactly the kind of man I need and love,” she told Moustaki in a letter intended to demonstrate her forgiveness. Though she no longer loved the composer, he could rely on her friendship: “What I need now is a very calm, orderly life, which in any case would not have suited you,” she wrote with a touch of bad faith.

  Davis soon learned that, despite Piaf’s wish for calm, it was hopeless to think that she would change. Her entourage made bets about how long “le doux Dougy” would survive the demands of being her escort on her summer tour. At her first engagement, in Monte Carlo, he watched the theater fill with celebrities (Gary Cooper, Elizabeth Taylor, Eddie Fisher, Aristotle Onassis), who leapt to their feet when Piaf sang “Milord.” After the performance, the star “fell literally into the arms of Douglas Davis, the young painter with whom she returned from America,” an observer noted. She declared to all, “Without him I’d be dead.”

  Since Edith needed her escort by her side at all times, the American found it impossible to do portraits of the celebrities he was meeting, or to lead his own life. One night she insisted that he drive her from the Riviera to her country home, despite his fatigue. Davis lost control of the wheel near the end; two of Edith’s ribs were broken. For the rest of the tour, she sang with her rib cage bandaged and blamed Davis for the accident. By the time they reached Bordeaux, the American had h
ad enough. They quarreled; he went back to Paris to devote himself to his portraits, ignoring Edith’s threats of suicide. “It was unbearable,” he later told the press. “She’s killing everyone with her impossible way of life.”

  Edith had to believe that there was another life after this one, she told Jean Noli, the journalist who would help her write her memoirs. Thus far, her own had been “a series of deaths and resurrections. What the doctors never understand is that I always get well because of my moral strength.… You only die of illness when you’re afraid.” Although these Rosicrucian-influenced beliefs may have comforted the star, the lack of a companion that autumn, when her health again declined, made her doubt her certainty. In September, she was taken to the American Hospital to undergo an operation for pancreatitis. Jacques Pills rushed to see her; Yves Montand telegrammed from New York. Four days later, Edith’s intimates cheered when she awoke with a deep-throated laugh: “Her laughter … meant that she had come through, she hadn’t decided to leave them.”

  The star spent October going between Paris and her country home with her entourage, who knew that her health depended on her ability to keep performing. Cocteau arrived in a black velvet cape to read her his new poems and tell her that he loved her. Monnot composed a dramatic setting for Edith’s equally dramatic lyrics for “C’est l’amour,” a proclamation of “le droit d’aimer” (“the right to love”), which was conferred by the tears one shed for the beloved. Michel Rivgauche wrote lyrics inspired by Edith’s persona, including the aptly titled “Ouragan” (“Hurricane”); Claude Léveillée, a Canadian composer who had joined the household at Piaf’s invitation, wrote music to match Rivgauche’s dark poems. Robert Chauvigny played piano at all hours; Marc Bonel devised riffs on the accordion and, with Danielle, calmed Edith, while helping to sustain the household’s effervescence.