No Regrets

by Carolyn Burke

  Devastated by grief, Théo could not rouse himself to receive visitors, though he did manage to do Edith’s hair one last time. “This tragedy was too much for him,” Danielle said. “He was still so young and had never gone through anything so cruel.” That weekend, Théo opened the apartment to the hordes of admirers who filled the street outside, a decision he came to regret when objects that had belonged to Edith disappeared in the confusion, even as security guards tried to control the throngs. If some made off with what they saw as holy relics, others pocketed what were at best souvenirs or, more cynically, items that would acquire commercial value given the magnitude of her reputation.

  The Archbishop of Paris showed no ambivalence when Danielle requested a mass for Piaf, who, she explained, had always been pious despite her divorce and remarriage. Her notoriety made this impossible, he replied. L’Osservatore Romano, the organ of the Vatican, had declared that she lived “a public life in a state of sin,” that she was, moreover, “an icon of false happiness.” The Archbishop offered a compromise. The chaplain appointed to minister to artists would officiate at the funeral on October 14. The night before, a priest who said that in the past Edith had restored his faith defied the Vatican and blessed her body.

  Piaf’s funeral procession, the only occasion since World War II to bring Paris traffic to a halt, began in the morning. More than forty thousand mourners accompanied the black limousines from the plush sixteenth arrondissement to the modest streets of Belleville and, finally, Père-Lachaise. The throngs, made up of ordinary Parisians, poured out their love for the star who, they felt, had given voice to their lives. Thousands crossed themselves and stood in silence as the procession passed.

  Once at the cemetery, things got out of hand. Women wept and fell to the ground; spectators climbed onto tombs for a better view; people threw themselves at the celebrities in attendance, for autographs. The police were barely able to keep order as the official mourners—Théo and the Lamboukas and Gassion families, Barrier, Coquatrix, Margantin, the Bonels, and Piaf’s friends, including Aznavour, Pills, Dumont, and Dietrich—threaded their way along the cobblestones. At the graveside the chaplain made up for the lack of a mass with ritual blessings and absolution. When Edith was laid to rest, the president of the SACEM, the organization that had once refused to admit her to its ranks, pronounced an oration that concluded simply, “A type of French song comes to an end with Edith Piaf.”

  “She had a burial fit for a queen,” Noli’s taxi driver observed as he and Vassal rode through the city that day. Though it seemed fitting that she had been buried with her statue of Saint Thérèse and holy images along with her stuffed animals, Noli was shocked by the chaotic circumstances surrounding the event. “You know,” Vassal replied, “I’m sure that Edith would have loved to be present. It was another triumph!” The crowd’s fervor had turned the occasion into a state funeral.

  “The final curtain has come down,” Paris Match began the first of two special issues devoted to the star. Reviving the legend of Piaf as suffering artist, the article continued, “She was just a bit of sorrowful flesh in an orphan’s black dress.… an atmosphere in which the common people, those who came from the streets, saw themselves.… Today in Paris there is someone missing.” Yet the “dark legend” of Piaf’s life had been counterbalanced by her faith. Blending popular mythology and saint’s life, the twenty-two-page feature ended with Cocteau’s last letter to Piaf—as if their friendship, and their nearly simultaneous deaths, established her place in French history.

  A week later, Paris Match published a second issue, entitled “Her Voice Will Never Die.” After noting more than three hundred thousand of her records had sold the weekend following her death (proof that there existed “an electricity of the heart” between Piaf and the people), the magazine printed an interview with Jacques Bourgeat. As her confidant, mentor, and spiritual father, he told the story of her desire to better herself. The interview closed with his pupil’s last words to him: “Our friendship will never end. Even in the Beyond, it will continue right to the end of always.”

  More prosaically, the New York Times observed that France had suffered a “double loss.” The article quoted Cocteau’s last words: “The boat is going down,” he had said soon after commenting on Piaf’s death and shortly before his own. “It was a poetic image of a vanished world of people he had known who had worked with him and around him to add luster to contemporary French culture,” the reporter explained for the benefit of American readers.

  Whereas the Times accorded greater significance to the death of the poet, the French press kept publishing special features on the singer. Ten days after Piaf’s funeral, France Dimanche published an edition that included a letter said to be her “last confession.” It reads: “Suddenly I feel the need for purity, the desire to weep that used to overtake me when I was a little girl. The desire to rest my head on a friendly shoulder, to close my eyes and, finally, to rest. When I think of my life, all that debauchery, that waste of strength, I’m ashamed. When I look back on that little woman in her fur coat dragging her loneliness and ennui through the night, I think that that’s what Piaf was. I ask everyone’s forgiveness. When you read this letter, to be published after my death, do not cry.”

  Piaf’s “confession” has never been authenticated. If she did write it, she failed to see what her life meant to those whose forgiveness she requested. Like her public, she thought in terms of saints and sinners—the Madonna and the Magdalene—when it came to judging a woman. Yet her refusal of self-pity also shows what Piaf was: a people’s diva whose courage matched her extraordinary gifts, a soul who gave of herself until there was nothing left but her voice and the echo of her laughter. It was her deep-throated laugh, Aznavour believed, “that freed her from anguish, sorrow, and fear—her only fear, of being unable to go onstage to win over the crowds who loved her.” Decades later, he still missed her anarchic laughter. More than anything, he thought, it expressed her life’s hectic drama, its boundless joie de vivre.

  Coda

  As one might expect, Piaf’s admirers and music-business colleagues showed their bereavement in different ways. Marcel Blistène’s farewell to her, Au revoir Edith, was written in great haste the weekend after her death; it reached bookstores a week later. By this time, her records had sold out all over France; Pathé and Philips rushed to replenish their stocks while the mass mourning continued. Tributes with titles like “Ils parlent d’elle” (“They Talk About Her”) were shown before feature films at Gaumont cinemas throughout the year.

  On the first anniversary of her death, Pierre Desgraupes presented a television special—La Mort d’Edith Piaf, a documentary including Marc Bonel’s movies of Edith recuperating from an illness months before her 1960 Olympia triumph. Almost immediately a controversy broke out in the press, which accused Desgraupes and the Bonels of morbid sensationalism. (“There could be no better way to betray the memory of the departed,” Arts magazine protested.)

  This controversy marked the start of a struggle over the meaning of Piaf’s life. She had occupied such a large place in the national imagination that it needed to be filled or, more cynically, exploited as soon as possible. Her intimates were drawn into rival attempts to claim her heritage. For the next six months, with the aid of Danielle Bonel, Théo tried to settle matters. His return to the stage less than two months after Edith’s death was criticized by journalists, who called it a lack of respect while noting that his performance could not help evoking her, as if she were still by his side. Théo’s attempts to obtain a share of Piaf’s royalties were met with opposition from Pathé, for whom she had been the “interpreter” of her best-known songs but not their author. Meanwhile, his career faltered as his debts accumulated—until the end of the 1960s, when he was offered spots in films and on television. In 1970, when it seemed that Piaf’s widower had at last earned his place in the entertainment world, he died in a car crash. A memorial service was held at the Byzantine church where they had bee
n married, before his burial beside Edith at Père-Lachaise.

  During these years, her entourage made peace with their loss as well as they could, though not always with one another. The Bonels continued to be blamed for what some called a venal interest in making their movies and other souvenirs of their time with Piaf available to the media. (When France Dimanche asked to publish their memoirs, the couple accepted a sum large enough so they could retire, but only after consulting with Théo and with Loulou Barrier, who said that this was their due, given their years of loyal service.) In the other camp, or camps, Ginou Richer would accuse the couple of exploiting their years with the star, Jean Noli would publish his version of her last years, and Hugues Vassal would write three books on his time with Edith, with the emphasis on her importance to him as a source of artistic and spiritual guidance. Pierre Lacotte’s ballet La Voix was produced on French television in 1965, with Edith’s voice heard in the background while the hero and heroine danced the story of their amours.

  As the singer’s intimates dealt with the aftermath of her death, the entertainment business searched for “the new Piaf.” There were several candidates, including Juliette Gréco and Catherine Sauvage. But Gréco was already a star in her own right, and Sauvage was well known in France as a mordant interpreter of lyrics by Brassens and Ferré. This left two young singers discovered on a 1965 television talent show, Georgette Lemaire and Mireille Mathieu. Lemaire, who like Piaf came from Belleville and performed réaliste classics at local dance halls, had a richly resonant voice that recalled Piaf’s register. But the music business had other plans. Mathieu, the younger of the two, was more amenable to taking direction from an industry that quickly chose her as Piaf’s successor, arranging for her to sing at official events and ensuring that her fame would eclipse that of her rival, despite Lemaire’s more “Piaf-like” voice.

  A fresh scandal erupted in 1967, by which time Mathieu had been crowned as Piaf’s successor. Léo Ferré, whose songwriting career Piaf had jump-started by urging him to move to Paris, declared the star irreplaceable in his new song, “A une chanteuse morte” (“To a Dead Songstress”). Piaf had a bird’s name, he began, but she sang with such power that she conjured multitudes. Hailing her as if she were still alive, he called her “un Wagner du carrefour, un Bayreuth de trottoir” (“a crossroads Wagner, a Bayreuth of the streets”). Ferré continued, “Tu aurais chanté France-Soir comme de l’Apollinaire” (“You could have sung France-Soir like a poem by Apollinaire”), but the campaign to replace her by the industry’s “shit merchants” (“auteurs de la merde”) was all about money. In the last line, Ferré called out for an end to this travesty: “Arretez! Arretez la musique!” he yelled, quoting the last line of “L’Accordéoniste.” This fierce denunciation of the Mathieu phenomenon was omitted from Ferré’s next album by his record company, the same label that handled Mathieu.

  Two years later, another exploitation of Piaf’s heritage appeared under the name of Simone Berteaut, who hired a ghostwriter to produce Piaf, a book that would achieve international success, thanks to its luridness and to the author’s claim to be Piaf’s half sister. Momone’s garish portrait of Edith’s “debauchery,” coupled with her promotion of herself to equal standing with the star (supported by “eyewitness” accounts of events at which she had not been present), so enraged Edith’s actual half sister, Denise, and brother, Herbert, that they sued Berteaut and her publisher for damages and called for the book’s suppression. Their suit was joined by legal action on the part of Marinette Cerdan concerning Berteaut’s accounts of the boxer, but their efforts came to nothing. Shortly before his death, Théo Sarapo said of the affair, “I wish Edith’s memory could be left in peace.”

  As Léo Ferré foresaw, Piaf would remain a living presence in France. Since 1963, the French media have churned out magazine features, books, television specials, and films about the star, often coinciding with the anniversary of her death or the appearance of new interpreters of her repertoire. Ten years after her death, the Association of the Friends of Edith Piaf was formed and a museum of Piaf memorabilia opened: it continues to attract thousands of visitors each year. In 1981, Jacques Chirac, then mayor of Paris, inaugurated the Place Edith Piaf in Belleville. In 2003, six lost Piaf recordings were found in the Bibliothèque Nationale, an event hailed in the press as a major cultural discovery. That same year, the city of Paris held a massively attended exhibition, Piaf, la môme de Paris, and erected a statue of the singer on the square named for her, near the Edith Piaf bar, itself a miniature museum of sorts. A few streets away, her grave (which lacks an epitaph) is regularly covered with bouquets from admirers whose numbers exceed those drawn to other famous graves at Père-Lachaise.

  Given the mounting expressions of Piaf-worship in the years following her death, it was inevitable that film projects would be aired. Warner Bros.’ plans for a feature film with Liza Minnelli as Piaf were announced in 1973, and Minnelli was quoted as saying that the singer reminded her of her mother, Judy Garland. This project was dropped because of the cost of filming in France, then turned over to the French company that produced Piaf: The Sparrow of Pigalle, in 1974: a commercial failure in France, it was not distributed in the United States. Ten years later, Claude Lelouch’s Edith and Marcel, with Marcel Cerdan, Jr., as his father, suffered a similar fate outside France. The third attempt to film the star’s life won international recognition and an Oscar for Marion Cotillard, the actress who played Piaf—despite its focus on the dark side of her life and its jumbled chronology. (“It wasn’t Cotillard who was being honored,” one of Edith’s intimates quipped. “It was Piaf.”)

  Tributes to Piaf by kindred souls are found in the work of generations of songwriters whose compositions she inspired. In addition to her intimates, such as Aznavour, Moustaki, and Dumont, who all acknowledge her role in shaping their careers, younger composers have also found her life and repertoire to be rich sources for their own. Elton John’s 1976 “Cage the Songbird” declares in no uncertain terms: “You can trap the free bird / But you’ll have to clip her wings.” Piaf would be a rock star if she were still alive, Céline Dion chanted in “Piaf chanterait du rock” (1991). The following year, a gathering of punk-rock groups proved the point with an album of songs first sung by Piaf and Fréhel, Ma Grand-Mère est une rockeuse (My Grandmother Is a Rocker).

  Piaf’s story has also inspired playwrights and performers in France and around the world. As of this writing, Jil Aigrot continues to tour France as the “voice” of Piaf in the biopic starring Cotillard; the musical comedy L’Empiaffée wryly updates Piaf’s repertoire to show the travails of a “song-worker”; television talent shows feature aspirant stars trying to improve their luck by singing Piaf standards. Presentations based on her life produced elsewhere have included recitals by Juliette Koka and Raquel Bitton in the United States, Jane Lapotaire’s play Piaf in the U.K., and Caroline Nin’s one-woman shows in Europe and Australia. The singer’s heritage is currently being reinterpreted by Gay Marshall, who emphasizes Piaf’s high spirits; Ziaf, a rock-inspired band that plays in France and the United States; and Piaf, une vie en rose et noir, a cabaret-style revue that has performed in France, the Middle East, and China. Nathalie Lhermitte, who plays the singer, told the press recently, “Piaf has been our lucky star.”

  While I was writing this book, people often spoke of Piaf’s fame in countries as distant from, or as unlike, the one with which she is so thoroughly identified—for instance, in Japan, where her songs are thought to convey the essence of that country’s aesthetic, the urge to enjoy what is fleeting as it passes, or in Russia, where they are available in Cyrillic and the young singer Pelageya is called “the Russian Piaf.” It was pleasing to learn that though Piaf never made the trip she envisioned in 1962 to perform in the Soviet Union, decades later the Russian astronomer Lyudmila Karachkina decided to name a small planet after her: 3772 Piaf. Since then, the diminutive star has been part of the solar system, her incandescence illuminating our lives
below.

  On a return trip to Père-Lachaise, where I again met many of her admirers, it was clear to me that Piaf lives on, although differently from the way she imagined. The famous cemetery, the chansonnier Allain Leprest sings in “Edith”—a moody ballad that perpetuates her heritage—is a full house whose audience is arranged in rows: “Her spirit haunts a strange music-hall / The leaves of the trees cry encore.” This allusive tribute asks the listener, “Do you know what artists do / To make death no sadder / Than saying au revoir …?” Its reply could serve as Edith’s epitaph: “Millions of anonymous lovers / Come to leave their bouquets / In the back of Père-Lachaise / Section ninety-six / Where she found her last nest / Madame Edith Lamboukas / Known as ‘Piaf’ …”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This life of Edith Piaf could not have been written without the gracious participation of many of her friends, lovers, and collaborators, the archivists and collectors who granted me access to important new material, and the fans still imbued with her spirit nearly fifty years after her death. Together they helped me grasp her immense impact in her own time and her unstinting generosity—the openheartedness that to this day reaches across cultural divides to give listeners goose bumps when they hear her voice.