No Regrets

by Carolyn Burke

  Edith left the stage for a glass of water. By the awed looks on her friends’ faces, she saw that she had won their hearts just as she had won the audience’s. “I think it’s working,” she said modestly. There would be twenty-two curtain calls. Coquatrix told her that he had never seen anything like what had just happened—four thousand people enraptured in a collective love fest.

  Three days later, for Piaf’s gala performance, show business celebrities came to pay their respects. Film directors Claude Chabrol and Roger Vadim sat with actors Alain Delon, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean-Claude Brialy, and Johnny Hallyday, the teenage pop star known as the French Elvis. The actresses Michèle Morgan, Romy Schneider, and Piaf’s old rival Arletty joined them, as did her former lover Félix Marten, who shouted, “Men, on your feet!” when she sang “Milord.” At the end of the performance, Louis Armstrong, in the audience that night, was heard to say that Piaf had ripped his heart out; Duke Ellington presented himself at her dressing-room door as a jazz musician who wanted to say bravo.

  If there had been any doubt in Edith’s mind about her status as national icon, they were dispelled that evening. “I adore her,” an awestruck Johnny Hallyday murmured. He would later acknowledge her influence on his generation, the young French singers who absorbed her emotional style even when it seemed at odds with rhythms inspired by American rock, jazz, and blues. Dumont, whose successful career as a songwriter dates from her Olympia triumph, reflected years later, “Edith was the lynch-pin between an earlier time, starting with the chanson réaliste, and the new generation of singers in France—the end of the old era and the start of the new.” What was more, at that precise moment, she personified the Gallic way of meeting adversity in her belief that there was no reason to regret the past, no reason at all.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  1961–1962

  In the new year, the main topics of interest among Parisians were Algeria and Edith Piaf. As De Gaulle prepared a referendum on Algerian independence despite widespread opposition, the press was glad to have something positive to report: Piaf’s phoenixlike resuscitation. An observer wrote of her Olympia concert, “It wasn’t the dying woman of last year, the pitiful, staggering one with a swollen face, but the Edith Piaf of ten years ago.” The star could now support those who had given her support in the past, like Bruno Coquatrix: “He was nearly ruined.… Edith was all but penniless, her illnesses and friends having used up what she had. Now they’re both saved.” She was a “miraculée” turned miracle-maker, her recovery an example for all.

  For the rest of 1961, as violent conflicts between Algerian separatists and their opponents brought the war home and sporadic bombings terrorized Paris, “Non, je ne regrette rien” was played and replayed on the radio, as if Piaf’s voice evoked a national consensus. “This powerful emotive force,” a historian writes, “was further enhanced by the unlimited popular belief in Piaf’s ability to crystallize the deepest wishes of the human heart.” To Le Figaro she was the voice of France itself: “More than ever, Edith Piaf strikes us as one of those mythical beings toward whom a large class of people, or an entire era, channels its own frenzy.”

  After three-quarters of the voters in metropolitan France approved De Gaulle’s referendum, he began preparing for Algerian independence despite the opposition of that country’s colonial population, the pieds-noirs, or “black feet,” whose hostility to plans for a Muslim-led country would continue to fuel the conflict. In April, a putsch by rebellious army generals marked a turning point. From then on, the OAS (Organisation de l’Armée Sécrète) would wage a bloody war against Algerian independence. After the putsch failed, a Foreign Legion unit that had backed the generals left their barracks singing their new anthem, Piaf’s “Non, je ne regrette rien.”

  Meanwhile, the star was news in her adopted country, where her record albums continued to sell widely. The New York Times ran a long article on the resurrection of the “Sparrow Kid” by a reporter who had attended one of her Olympia concerts. Piaf’s life, he wrote, was “a cliché of the Paris pavements.… But whether the story is true to the last agonizing misfortune, Parisians and the French in general take it to be true. The myth is larger than the woman. To Piaf fans, the question of where fact and fancy blur becomes wholly unimportant when she starts to sing.” Though “a frail old woman” (she was forty-five), Piaf “belts them out like Joe DiMaggio,” an American in the audience declared, provoking a Frenchwoman to reply, “She’s not singing to you.… She’s confessing.”

  Piaf’s unofficial canonization lasted until the press began speculating about her relations with Dumont. To quell insinuations, she stopped singing “T’es l’homme qu’il me faut”—a song co-written with the composer, who was thought to be its addressee. It went: “J’ai eu beau chercher / Je n’ai rien trouvé / Pas un seul défaut / T’es l’homme, t’es l’homme, t’es l’homme / … qu’il me faut.” (“I looked in vain / Didn’t find a thing / Not a single flaw / You’re the man, you’re the man, you’re the man / … I need.”) Paris-Presse wrote, predictably, “There’s a new man in Edith Piaf’s life.… If her Olympia comeback was spectacular, it’s because she’s in love.” Dumont’s presence at her side on the television show Discorama showed her feelings for him, the writer continued; her glances at him as she sang their songs were proof of her devotion.

  Dumont, who was married and had children, was not her type, Edith protested. Besides, she no longer cared for love: she had suffered too much. Her denials did not persuade those who were intent on seeing her as a marriage-wrecker. “We were very close, but I was not Edith’s lover,” Dumont maintained, yet their intimacy colors the more than twenty songs he composed for her and the ten they wrote together. Her trust in him is apparent in their reprise of her romance with Cerdan, “La Belle Histoire d’amour,” which ends, rather predictably, with the lovers’ reunion in heaven. Soon Piaf insisted that Dumont become her singing partner. In their contrapuntal performance of “Les Amants,” which they co-wrote, he sings to someone very much like Edith, the “belle” who knows that their song resonates with the experience of all those who have been in love.

  As she had done with Moustaki, Davis, and other men in her life, Edith demanded that Dumont be available at all times. The composer did his best to keep her in good spirits. Exercising his sway, he had her banish Claude Figus, a bad influence since he supplied Edith with drugs. “When I knew her, she never touched alcohol, except for the occasional beer,” Dumont said. “She drank enormous amounts of tea and took far too many pills, often doubling or tripling the dosage. She said she needed them to keep on singing. People have said all sorts of things about Edith,” he continued. “They don’t realize that the scope of her career meant that she couldn’t be like the woman next door.”

  To the dismay of her entourage, Piaf extended her Olympia run through the first week of April. Physically she was a shadow of herself. What was worse, having abandoned Dr. Vaimber’s holistic approach, she now relied on cortisone, Dolosal (a pain medication that leads to dependency, like morphine), and Coramine (a central-nervous-system stimulant injected shortly before she went onstage). After performances, Dumont and Barrier carried the star to her dressing room. At home, Danielle undressed her and put her to bed.

  When Barrier begged Piaf to end the engagement, she said that she had to keep going for financial reasons: so many people depended on her. Her deterioration was obvious. She was alarmingly thin; her body was swollen, her face puffy, and her skin yellowish orange from the drugs. Although her memory was suffering and she sometimes experienced vertigo onstage, she stayed the course through strength of will and nightly injections of Coramine.

  Unable to admit that she was seriously ill, the star made plans to conquer an unfamiliar country, the Soviet Union, to the extent of ordering a new black dress at Lanvin. She recorded nineteen new songs, including five by Dumont, and English versions of “Non, je ne regrette rien” (“No Regrets”) and “Mon Dieu” (“My God”) in advance of her U.S. engagemen
ts. In the meantime, after a week’s rest at Barrier’s country house, she insisted on making her spring tour of Brussels and provincial towns in France, accompanied by her exhausted entourage. “If you want to die slowly, go ahead, but at least try to sleep,” her doctor told her the night before their departure. “I’m afraid of sleep,” she replied. “It’s almost like death. I hate it.”

  On tour, the star was no better. Each night, Dumont carried her from the hotel to her Mercedes (purchased the year before), then from the car to her dressing room, where an injection gave her the strength to go on. In Brussels, she performed even though she had lost her voice, whispering some songs and reciting others until she could sing part of “Non, je ne regrette rien.” After each show, her entourage stayed up with her until the effect of the stimulants wore off. The rest of the time, she slept or sat unmoving in her chair.

  In May, after recording “Les Amants,” Piaf again fell ill. She was taken to the American Hospital for the removal of intestinal adhesions—a routine operation, the press was told—but one that had to be repeated two weeks later, because of complications. Still convalescing from recent surgeries (she had undergone eight in the last two and a half years), Piaf announced that she was preparing several new songs with Dumont for her autumn season. What she did not say was that the composer, who was close to a nervous breakdown, had taken a stand. Unless Edith returned to the clinic where she had been treated for drug dependency, he would no longer work with her. After three weeks there during the summer, she spent the rest of the year convalescing at home and at Barrier’s country house. Her run of bad health had begun the year before, she believed, when someone took the cross that Dietrich had given her—which she kissed each night before going onstage.

  It may have surprised Piaf to learn that Warner Bros. had bought the rights to her life. The star was not asked to play herself—a role intended for Leslie Caron—and, since the film was never made, may not have profited from the sale. About this time, she agreed to tell Jean Noli the story of her life, to be published in France Dimanche at ten thousand francs (about two thousand 1960s dollars) an installment. Blending Zola and True Confessions, she stressed her impoverished youth, then gave a sensational account of her travails with drink, drugs, and men. While relating her cures as if they had happened to someone else, she became agitated when recalling the most recent one: “While I was racked with pain on my bed, a face suddenly appeared to me: that of my mother, who had abandoned me when I was two months old, whom I found again fifteen years later in a tawdry room in Pigalle, gasping, ‘My fix, I want my fix!’ … It was her face, the memory of her, that saved me.”

  Piaf had ample time to draw up the balance sheet of her life during her convalescence. It might have been comforting to hear from Takis Horn a decade after their romance, when—in hopes of speeding her recovery—the actor sent her the Saint Thérèse medal she had given him before leaving Athens. But she was plunged into despair on October 12, when she learned of Monnot’s death, from a ruptured appendix for which the composer refused treatment. Blaming herself for their estrangement after so many years of close collaboration, Edith agreed to speak about the composer on a national broadcast. “It’s very hard,” she began, “to talk about Marguerite Monnot, since, as everyone knows, she was my best friend. I won’t even mention her talent; it’s what helped me to be Edith Piaf.”

  Piaf was too distraught about Monnot’s death to pay attention to the increasing civic unrest. On October 17, the Algerian separatists called on their compatriots in Paris to demonstrate against recent curtailments of their rights. Many demonstrators were beaten as they marched down the Champs-Elysées; those who died as a result of their injuries were thrown into the Seine. Even if Piaf knew of the massacre (it was not officially recognized until 1997), it is unlikely that she would have joined the artists and intellectuals who protested the police actions along with the increased presence of the OAS. Still too weak to do much but rest, she sought guidance in the work of Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit philosopher whose attempt to reconcile religious faith with science, The Phenomenon of Man, became required reading for her friends. Not sharing her enthusiasm for the book, they were heard to mutter that it was too esoteric, or to joke about having to take “tea in the garden,” a play on the author’s name.

  During Edith’s enforced respite, Coquatrix wrote that he missed her: “I spent a tête-à-tête with you one evening recently. Alone at my place, I kept playing the old records you made after the war—marvelous. And then I listened to the latest songs—even more marvelous. I’m waiting for the new ones, and then more; they are so badly needed, we all need you so much. If you knew how dull the ‘profession’ (our profession) has become without you!”

  In actuality, the French music scene was far from dull that year. The National Assembly almost managed to ban rock-and-roll concerts altogether, then gave up the attempt. In the autumn, Coquatrix hired Johnny Hallyday to sing at the Olympia for three weeks, despite his doubts about the French Elvis. Resplendent in a dinner suit, the eighteen-year-old danced the new trans-Atlantic craze, the twist, sang a French version of “Let’s Twist Again,” and generally took young people’s minds off the crisis (men his age were being sent to fight in Algeria). For some, Hallyday’s blend of agitated syncopation with the emotional urgency he had absorbed from Piaf created a new style in popular music, one that appealed to teenagers craving a culture of their own. For others, it was a betrayal of the great chanson tradition. Piaf was the end of music-hall, Noli believed. After her, there was only show business.

  Soon after a national radio program entitled Rock Has Landed in France ran a debate on the subversive new music, Hallyday’s performances were banned in several provincial cities. When he was allowed to play, the police used tear gas to control the crowds. Within a few months of these disturbances, the OAS, oddly attuned to the younger generation’s rebelliousness, would launch a violent attempt to sabotage De Gaulle’s plans for a cease-fire under the code name “Operation Rock and Roll.”

  The year 1962 began with Dumont’s disgrace. After fourteen months of devoting his life to Piaf, he needed a vacation. A trip to the Alps would restore his health, he believed. If Edith joined him, both would benefit from the air and the healthy way of life. Reluctantly, she made plans to accompany the composer in January but changed her mind at the last minute. The Paris air suited her perfectly, she told Noli; now that Dumont had left without her, he was not welcome at the Boulevard Lannes. Up to this point, the composer had exercised a positive influence over Edith, despite what she saw as his most serious flaw—the family he refused to sacrifice to be at her service.

  A few days after Dumont’s departure, Claude Figus wangled his way back into Piaf’s good graces. As her protégé, Figus had been promised a gig at Patachou’s Montmartre cabaret, where the well-known singer and her friends—Aznavour, Brel, Brassens—all performed. Knowing that the best way to Edith’s heart was through music, Figus sent her a copy of his first single, “A t’aimer comme j’ai fait.” The lyrics were bound to please her: “Je t’aime comme un chien / Peut adorer son maître” (“I love you as a dog / Adores his master”). Piaf succumbed to his flattery; Figus rejoined her as her secretary and drug provider.

  One night, Figus brought with him a tall, good-looking twenty-six-year-old of Greek extraction named Théophanis Lamboukas. A hairdresser who worked at his family’s salon in the Paris suburbs, Théo had always wanted to sing; though attracted to him in his own right, Figus also saw him as a companion for Edith, now that Dumont was out of the picture. At first, intimidated by her fame, Théo hardly spoke a word—until the night he spent at the Boulevard Lannes after missing the last train home. Recalling her idyll in Athens with Takis Horn, Edith baptized the coiffeur Théo Sarapo—a surname, she said, that in Greek meant “I love you.”

  Edith explained to friends that as her new secretary, Sarapo handled her correspondence, and Figus her appointments. The two men were her only visitors when she was again hos
pitalized in March after a bout of bronchial pneumonia, which required long hours in an oxygen tent. Noli pried the clinic’s address out of her entourage and, with Vassal, turned up to find Edith sipping tea while Figus and Sarapo drank champagne. When Piaf introduced Théo, the young man did not make a strong impression on Noli: “He was too gentle, too soft, too attentive.” Moreover, his manner seemed effeminate. Piaf asked the journalists to return the next day, when she would arrange to be in the oxygen tent for Vassal’s photograph: “In this kind of calculation she was infallible, relying solely on artistic instinct and her prodigious knowledge of her public.”

  Two days after Piaf’s release from hospital, the French and the Algerians signed the Evian Accords, ending the war. More preoccupied with getting back to work than with politics, she decided to forgive Dumont. Soon she began rehearsing his new songs for her, including “Toi, tu n’entends pas,” a woman’s complaint to a lover who is deaf to her passions (circuses, carousels, crowds, poets), and whom she admonishes, “Tu les entendras / … / Le jour où tu m’aimeras!” (You will hear them / … / When you love me!”). Together they sang his “Inconnu excepté de Dieu,” a meditation on the burial site of one “known only to God”—the phrase on the graves of countless unknown soldiers—with the words intoned by Piaf in the background.

  In 1962, in addition to five more of Dumont’s compositions, she recorded Mikis Theodorakis’ songs for the dance film The Lovers of Teruel (including the operatic title song and “Quatorze Juillet,” a bittersweet waltz), along with her one overtly political song, “Roulez tambours”—which she wrote about this time, perhaps thinking of all those unmarked graves. “Roll the drums,” it began: “Pour ceux qui meurent chaque jour / Pour ceux qui pleurent dans les faubourgs / Pour Hiroshima, Pearl Harbor.” (“For those who die each day / For those who weep in the slums / For Hiroshima, Pearl Harbor.”) To a litany of wars, the singer opposed her arms: love and music.