No Regrets

by Carolyn Burke

  Théo’s accounts of military service in Algeria as a twenty-year-old made it clear that this experience had left scars. His vulnerability moved Piaf in the same way that Doug Davis’s similar nature had won her heart. Since leaving Edith, the American had remained in France and painted portraits of Rex Harrison, Vivien Leigh, Alice B. Toklas, and his old friend the singer Rod McKuen; he had hopes for exhibitions in both Paris and Atlanta. In April, when Doug and Edith were reconciled, she invited him to stay at the Boulevard Lannes and commissioned portraits by him of her two secretaries. One can only imagine the emotional dynamics in the apartment, but having three male companions gave Piaf the energy she needed. And if Figus and Sarapo were still lovers, Théo’s affection for Edith was obvious to all.

  “Aren’t I lucky to have had so many beaux,” Piaf teased at a press conference. “They’re all young, handsome, charming, and, after knowing me, brimming with talent.” Théo was not her lover, she said, but in a few years he too would be singing at the Olympia. The music-hall tradition was in her debt: “There aren’t enough stars? Well, I know how to make them.” Each new discovery needed only to be photographed at her side to be known as her lover, a publicity coup worth millions. She had helped Dumont, Marten, Figus, Moustaki, and others this way. But where her private life was concerned, “people know only what I want them to.”

  She kept her sadness to herself after learning of Doug Davis’s death in a plane explosion on June 3, just after his embarkation with a group of art students bound for Atlanta. (McKuen wrote a poem entitled “Orly Field” as a memorial to Davis.) Mourning his death, which brought back that of Cerdan, Edith threw herself into preparations for the future. She rehearsed nonstop with Figus and Sarapo after persuading both Dumont and the young composer Francis Lai to set the lyrics she had written for her protégés. When Figus began singing at Chez Patachou, she worked exclusively with Théo, teaching him to support a song’s meanings with body language and gestures, often making him rehearse until he was near exhaustion.

  By June, Théo was ready to sing Emer’s love duet “A quoi ça sert, l’amour?” with Edith, the composer having rewritten it for them at her request. They appeared on national television as a couple who ask each other questions about love’s purpose. “What is love good for?” Théo crooned, gazing down at Edith. The reason for living, she sang, looking up into his eyes: “A chaque fois j’y crois / Et j’y croirai toujours / Ça sert à ça, l’amour.” Once again, amour rhymed with toujours. Willing herself to believe that this would be the case with Théo, she smiled: “Mais toi, t’es le dernier! / Mais toi, t’es le premier! / … / Toi que j’aimerai toujours / Ça sert à ça, l’amour.” (“Each time I believe / And I always will / … / But you’re the last one! / You’re the first one! / … / I’ll love you always / That’s what love is good for.”)

  In June, Pierre Desgraupes began his third televised interview with the star by asking, “Edith Piaf, are you happy?” “I’m happy when I’m singing,” she replied, “very happy.” To his query about the source of her strength, she said, “It’s a question of faith.” When he asked if she believed in chance, she smiled and said, “I simply believe.” Love had never disappointed her; it had given all that she desired. When Desgraupes asked why she always gave so much to younger singers, she said that she could see into people: “I have a kind of second sight. Even if no one else sees, I do. I see what a person will be in two years’ time.” As for Sarapo, she continued, “He’s exceeded my expectations; he’s learned with remarkable speed.”

  Edith toured the north of France with her two secretaries turned singing partners at the end of June; in July, she and Théo vacationed in Cannes, where they also gave several concerts. After an affectionate onstage reunion with Les Compagnons in Nice, she introduced Théo as her fiancé. “To be able to sing, you must be in love,” she added—a comment that made clear how closely their engagement was tied to her vision of the future. Though traditionalists might call them “the most dissimilar, astonishing, touching, ridiculous, irritating, sympathique, immoral couple,” the public loved the idea that la môme had found happiness.

  On her return to Paris, Piaf prepared six new songs, including “Roulez tambours,” “A quoi ça sert, l’amour,” and “Le Droit d’aimer”—whose lyrics proclaimed her right to love and be loved, “no matter what they say.” On September 25, she chanted “Le Droit d’aimer” from a platform on the Eiffel Tower to the huge audience gathered for the opening of Darryl Zanuck’s film on the Normandy invasion, The Longest Day. Terrified by the height, she nonetheless followed the new song with the previous year’s anthem, “Non, je ne regrette rien”—that night embodying the twin aspects of her persona as France’s eternal amoureuse and as she who rises above adversity to triumph. “To attain this altitude,” the writer Joseph Kessel said, echoing popular sentiment, “Piaf paid the price, every kind of price: poverty overcome, frailty and anxiety mastered, a merciless artistic standard, incredible courage.”

  At the end of September, some twenty-five hundred spectators applauded wildly when Edith sang with Théo at the Olympia. Seated in the front row at the gala performance, Hallyday was moved to tears, unaware that Edith was terrified after learning that Signoret and Montand, the singers Sacha Distel and Serge Gainsbourg, and the actress Michèle Morgan were in the audience. Piaf was clearly exhausted, an observer wrote; “her ravaged face resembled her most dramatic, most painful songs, her arms and body showed the stigmata of illness and suffering.” Yet she had triumphed again. She had made Théo into a singer and found the courage to envision marriage with a man twenty years her junior. The press, more cynical in their judgments, noted that her voice was harsh and had lost some of its power. Others commented on the tasteless display of Théo’s health when he sang bare-chested—a cruel contrast to Edith’s frailty.

  In private, confiding her doubts to Noli, she said that though marrying Théo made no sense given the age difference, with him she felt “not only the love of a woman for a man but also another feeling that life has denied me until now: maternal love.” In the end, she thought, “only those who see wrong in everything will be offended.” Piaf knew that she did not have long to live, Dumont reflected years later: “Her marriage to this young man shocked the press and the commentators but not the people, who adored Edith and Théo. She wanted to do something mythic … to show that right to the end, she embraced love, youth, beauty. It was hugely romantic.”

  Dumont was right about Edith’s public. On October 9, her wedding day, thousands of fans lined the streets of the sixteenth arrondissement to catch a glimpse of their idol, unaware that, until very recently, she had thought of changing her mind. That morning, the star’s romanticism won out over her sense of the ridiculous. With Barrier as their witness, the couple were wed in a civil ceremony by Robert Souleytis, the local mayor: “You are a great artist and a great Frenchwoman,” Souleytis told her. Then, at the Greek Orthodox church nearby, they took their vows while a chorus chanted and hundreds of candles flickered—the kind of wedding Edith had always wanted in the only church that would marry a divorcée. Théo (in a black suit and tie) kissed his wife (in a plain black dress) and smiled for the reporters, who outnumbered the guests. Prominent among them were Vassal and Noli, who took credit for talking Edith into marrying Théo for the benefit of the publicity they would receive in France Dimanche.

  When the newlyweds emerged from the church, they were showered with rice from nearby windows as paparazzi struggled to record the event and the crowd shouted “bravo.” The hordes of Parisians, monitored by six busloads of police, rivaled the crowds that greeted De Gaulle or Brigitte Bardot, Paris-Jour noted. It was a case of Lolita in reverse, L’Aurore wrote, Nabokov’s novel having recently caused a scandal in France: “That Edith Piaf arranged the saddest kind of publicity for her new union with a young man who was in diapers when she was singing ‘Le Fanion de la légion’ suggests either a lack of awareness or an obsession. It’s true that artists need their public. B
ut it’s too bad that an artist of her caliber decided to invite the public into her bedroom.” Refraining from personal remarks, an American television commentator noted that “the legendary singer of torch songs … has never lived by convention.”

  The next night, the newlyweds returned to the Olympia, where they were booked until October 24. Unmoved by the bravado of their union, some critics wrote scathingly of Piaf’s performance. Her new songs were preachy; what was worse, she sang off-key. “Marie-trottoir,” a revamped lady-of-the-night number by Vaucaire and Dumont, was a tiresome form of recrimination, one reporter said. Piaf was obviously ill, he continued, “and her remarkable voice is not the one that enchanted me when I listened to her records. The words waver; the notes quaver; the tunes are tuneless.” More charitably, the writer André Brink said that Piaf “was extending the range of music in a completely different direction.” Standing in the spotlight “like a dying moth,” she gripped the microphone and sang “in a voice like a shout from a tomb … the voice of life itself, refusing to die, refusing to be silenced, the voice of humanity itself.”

  Piaf’s appeal to humanity in general was well received by the throngs who came to applaud when she and Théo toured Belgium and Holland that winter. Each night from November 17 to the end of the year, the star walked gingerly onstage to “Non, je ne regrette rien.” Her repertoire did not vary, but she was sometimes barely able to complete the program. At Nijmegen on December 14, she sang off-key in the opening number—“Le Chant d’amour,” set to music by Dumont to suit the poignancy of Piaf’s lyrics about her “ordinary” love song. “Si vous voulez bien écouter / Je vais chanter un chant d’amour,” it began—“If you wish to listen / I’ll sing you a love song,” one that was based on her belief that those who truly loved each other met again after death. The crowd cheered in spite of her substandard performance, moved by the sentiment and her will to survive.

  Piaf’s hoarse, almost nasal tone was better suited to her protest song “Roulez tambours,” which she performed at each concert that winter. As the tempo slowed, she sang more softly: “J’ai vu tant de misère / Et tant souffrir autour de moi / Que je ne me rappelle guère / Si la douleur était pour moi / J’ai souvent vu pleurer ma mère / Je crois bien que c’était pour moi / J’ai presque vu pleurer mon père / Il ne m’a jamais dit pourquoi.” (“I’ve seen so much misery / So much sorrow all round / I can’t recall / If it was for me / I often saw my mother cry / I think she cried for me / I almost saw my father cry / He never told me why.”) Audiences sensed that the song linked personal grief to the world’s pain. But they could not know that in naming the ghosts who haunted her dreams, Piaf made her song an act of forgiveness.

  Many listeners took another song on the program, “Emporte-moi,” as an expression of the star’s wish to transcend her sorrows. Painting a lurid picture of the Pigalle she had known in her youth, Piaf implored, in a voice that was harsh and sometimes flat: “Emporte-moi bien loin, bien loin d’ici / Emporte-moi là-bas dans ton pays.” (“Take me away, far away from here / Take me over there to your country.”) Despite her vocal weakness, the audience also grasped the spiritual dimension of “Le Droit d’aimer,” concerning her need to give herself completely: “Quoiqu’on dise ou qu’on fasse / Tant que mon coeur battra / Quelle que soit la couronne / Les épines ou la croix.” (“Whatever they do or say / As long as I live / Despite the crown / The thorns or the cross.”) Piaf as Christ-figure required a stretch of the imagination, but the religion of love espoused in her songs struck a chord in her admirers.

  Edith and Théo were interviewed on television in Lyon three days after her forty-seventh birthday and just before Christmas, dates that were connected in her mind. Piaf said that the secret of her strength was her faith. Always an optimist, she was full of hope for the future; she sang about love because “that’s the basis of everything.” Théo would become a first-rate singer in time, she continued, though he confessed that his stage fright grew worse each night. The press did not agree. One journalist replied to the question posed by their duet, “A quoi ça sert, l’amour?” (“What is love for?”), by writing acerbically, “To make you blind, of course, though under some circumstances love would do better to be silent.” Even if many said that Théo lacked lung power, Piaf’s public embraced her despite the critics’ reservations.

  The star put on a brave front throughout the tour but was barely able to cope with the rigors of two shows daily over the course of six weeks. Her intimates wondered how much longer she could go on, even with stimulants. Her health was deteriorating before their eyes; her marriage was not a source of strength. “I won’t do any harm,” Barrier said decades later, “by telling you that there was no longer anything between her and Théo. ‘It’s been over for some time,’ she told me. She married him because it was too late to call it off vis-à-vis the press, the public, and maybe also Théo.”

  Although hugely romantic, their marriage had come too late, Dumont believed—when Piaf was too ill, too diminished in her sense of herself, to enjoy it. By this time, her mind was on final things—how to transmit to her public her faith in love as their shared reason for being, for the intense spiritual bond that they felt with each other.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  1963

  Piaf knew that her public was more forgiving than the critics who caviled about preachy lyrics and quavery performances. About this time, she recorded a talk meant to reveal all that she had learned from her tumultuous life. Music had long been her soul’s conduit, but she wanted to speak to her audience as friends—“because you are my friends,” she began, her voice full of warmth as she visualized them.

  “I’ve never regretted anything,” she continued, paraphrasing her famous song. “Each experience brought something … that helps me to express all sorts of feeling and emotion.” First she would speak about friendship. Having hurt many of her friends without meaning to, she said that one must put oneself in the other’s place rather than exercise judgment—a principle that also applied to social problems. For example, instead of rejecting the unruly fans of rock and roll, people should try to understand them: “They want to prove something.… There’s always this threat hanging over us—war, the aftermath of war, the next war. That takes the romance out of life. But the young want to have fun, to make noise, to be part of their century.”

  What mattered most was love. “Everything comes down to that, love for humanity, for work, for the things one loves, just plain love between two beings.” To live fully, people needed to find the love within, “to reveal it to yourselves.” One understood the meaning of experience, she thought, by paying the price for it and by being unselfish: “It’s extremely difficult to enjoy love to the utmost without asking for more. It’s already something to have had a little.” What was more, love, “the only emotion that money can’t buy,” existed in its own right long after the loved one’s death. Piaf ended this unusually direct talk by singing her hymn in memory of Cerdan, “La Belle Histoire d’amour”—confounding earthly and divine love in its address to the beloved who awaits her in heaven.

  Whatever reservations Edith had about her marriage, she adopted Théo’s family as her own. Her sisters-in-law Cathy and Christie taught her the twist; their mother asked Edith to call her Maman, though they were nearly the same age; Edith invited twenty-year-old Christie to live with her and Théo in Paris. On the advice of Loulou Barrier, she rewrote her will to leave everything to her husband, an act that she accomplished with difficulty given her arthritic hands. To celebrate Théo’s twenty-seventh birthday, Edith shared the stage with him for a benefit performance in January in the Lamboukases’ suburb—to the delight of their friends and neighbors, who saw the star’s marriage to the coiffeur as something like a fairy tale.

  The couple spent weeks rehearsing for their February engagement at the Bobino Theater in Montparnasse, where Edith first sang in 1938. Intimidated by her sister-in-law, Christie sat quietly as they went over each song in Théo’s repertoire, in
cluding several composed for him by Edith. When the young woman said that she too wanted to sing, Edith began teaching her along with Théo. As Christie Laume (a surname chosen for her by Piaf), she was to introduce the program and sing three tunes of the sort called yé-yé, the youth craze being marketed with songs that wed adolescent yearnings to the intoxicating beat of rock and roll. This new style was light stuff compared with her tradition, Piaf told Noli. But, in accordance with her belief that the young should do things their way, she inspired Christie to become a practitioner of yé-yé—which suited her youthful looks better than the theatrical chanson.

  That winter, as the radio program Salut les copains (Hi, Guys and Gals) pumped out yé-yé hits by sprightly young women—France Gall, Françoise Hardy, and Sylvie Vartan, who later married Johnny Hallyday—Piaf’s fans awaited her return. “A newlywed is coming back to the music-hall,” a critic wrote with tongue in cheek. “Edith Piaf hasn’t ceased to amaze us,” he continued, noting rumors that considerable progress had been made by “Monsieur Piaf.”

  Meanwhile, Edith and Théo sang at a succession of Paris movie theaters, her preferred way to prepare for new engagements. “Edith loved to work like this,” Danielle Bonel explained. “She went home each night after singing to people who couldn’t afford the great Parisian theaters. It was her way of keeping in touch … since, in those days, working-class families didn’t have televisions.” It was also her way of teaching her husband the difference between the overnight-success stories of the new music business and the slow growth of singers’ reputations in the era of chanson.

  Piaf’s decision to appear at the Bobino, which had seen better days, was another way of keeping in touch with the great numbers of her followers who had modest resources. On opening night, the Bobino was full of working-class couples from the neighborhood (Montparnasse was then less fashionable than today). Holding Sophie, the poodle that was Théo’s gift to Edith, in her arms, Christie introduced her brother, the opening act, then Edith, who sang fifteen songs, including several new ones inspired by her old themes—streetwalkers (“Margot coeur gros”) and sailors (“Tiens v’là un marin”)—and the “ordinary” love song she had composed with Dumont, “Le Chant d’amour.”