No Regrets
Page 32
25 “the most beautiful”: EP quoted in “Piaf: L’amour? J’y crois toujours!,” Ici Paris, June 1–7, 1960, in Lévy, p. 175.
26 “It is hard to say”: In Duclos and Martin, p. 413.
27 “If I had to live”: EP quoted in Paris-Jour [Sept. 1960], in ibid., p. 415.
28 “My life changed”: Charles Dumont interview with the author, June 28, 2008.
29 “I always go”: Cinq colonnes à la une, broadcast Dec. 2, 1960. The last line of “Non, je ne regrette rien” translates as “It all starts with you.”
30 “your strong heart”: JC to EP, radio broadcast, Radio Lausanne [n.d.], MBA.
31 “At this sad time”: Bruno Coquatrix, “Programme Olympia,” in Marchois, Piaf: Emportée, p. 119.
32 “to be setting out”: Michèle Manceaux, “La Semaine, Piaf ressuscitée,” L’Express, Jan. 4, 1961, p. 33.
33 “I think it’s working”: For information in this paragraph, see Noli, Edith, pp. 48–50.
34 “I adore her”: Johnny Hallyday, in L’Hymne à la Môme, film.
35 “Edith was the lynch-pin”: Dumont interview with the author, June 28, 2008.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN • 1961–1962
1 “It wasn’t the dying woman”: Juliette Boisrivaud, “Le Double Miracle d’Edith Piaf,” in Marchois, Piaf: Emportée, p. 118.
2 “This powerful emotive”: Klein, Florilège, p. 239.
3 “More than ever”: Paul Carrière, in Le Figaro [c. Jan. 1961].
4 “a cliché”: Milton Bracker, “Miracle of the ‘Sparrow Kid,’ ” New York Times Magazine, Jan. 22, 1961, p. 9.
5 “There’s a new man”: “L’Aveu d’Edith Piaf: Cet Homme au piano,” Paris-Presse, Jan. 21, 1961, in Marchois, Piaf: Emportée, p. 119.
6 no longer cared for love: EP quoted in Duclos and Martin, p. 421.
7 “We were very close”: Dumont interview with the author, June 28, 2008. All subsequent quotations of Dumont are from this interview.
8 “If you want”: EP’s physician and EP quoted in Noli, Edith, p. 70.
9 “While I was racked”: EP quoted in Jean Noli, “Ses Confidences à France Dimanche,” France Dimanche, no. 3253 [2008], clipping, HVA. There is a similar account of this incident in EP, Ma vie, p. 68.
10 “It’s very hard”: EP quoted in Marchois, Edith Piaf: Opinions, p. 187. Raymond Asso wrote of Monnot, after her death, “She came late to all of her appointments but found the way to be early for the final one” (ibid., p. 188).
11 “I spent a tête-à-tête”: Coquatrix letter, n.d., quoted in Bonini, p. 481.
12 end of music-hall: Jean Noli, Piaf secrète, p. 218.
13 “He was too gentle”: Noli, Edith, pp. 106–7.
14 “Aren’t I lucky”: EP quoted in “Piaf: Voici comment mes secrétaires font fortune,” Paris-Jour, March 27, 1962, in Marchois, Piaf: Emportée, p. 120.
15 “Edith Piaf, are you happy?”: Cinq colonnes à la une, broadcast June 1, 1962.
16 “To be able”: EP quoted in G.P., “Tout recommence avec lui,” in Paris Match, Aug. 4, 1962, in Marchois, Piaf: Emportée, p. 120.
17 “the most dissimilar”: Alain Spiraux, in La Presse, Sept. 29, 1962, in ibid., p. 121.
18 “To attain this altitude”: Joseph Kessel quoted in Brierre, p. 152.
19 “her ravaged face”: Patrick Thevenon, “Victoire, victoire! Edith, tu as encore gagné,” La Presse, Sept. 29, 1962, in Marchois, Piaf: Emportée, p. 121.
20 “not only the love”: EP, Ma vie, p. 165.
21 “Her marriage”: Dumont quoted in Brierre, p. 152.
22 “You are a great artist”: Robert Sauleytis quoted in Duclos and Martin, p. 436.
23 “That Edith Piaf arranged”: François Brigneau, “Mme. Edith Piaf … avec nos regrets,” L’Aurore, Oct. 10, 1962, in Marchois, Piaf: Emportée, p. 121.
24 “the legendary singer”: “Edith Piaf and Théo Sarapo Wedding Video,” http://vodpod.com/watch/1611937-edith-piaf-and-theo-sarapo-wedding.
25 “and her remarkable voice”: Anonymous Swiss reporter cited in Bonini, p. 500.
26 “was extending the range”: André Brink, A Fork in the Road, pp. 161–62.
27 “that’s the basis”: Interview with EP and Théo Sarapo, Théâtre des Celestins, Dec. 22, 1962, www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLRH51OjmZs.
28 “To make you blind”: Anon., La Dernière Heure, quoted in Bonini, p. 511.
29 “I won’t do any harm”: Barrier quoted in Duclos and Martin, p. 438.
30 when Piaf was too ill: According to Dumont, Piaf’s relations with Sarapo were not sexual: “She was in a state in which a woman doesn’t want a sexual relation with a young man” (Bonini, p. 488).
CHAPTER SIXTEEN • 1963
1 “because you are”: EP, radio broadcast c. 1962, “Piaf/Documents, Télé,” MBA.
2 This new style: EP quoted in Noli, Edith, p. 148. Though less successful than other yé-yé stars, Christie Laume would go on to make three record albums.
3 “A newlywed”: A.S., in Marchois, Piaf: Emportée, p. 122.
4 “Edith loved to work”: Bonel and Bonel, p. 302.
5 “in stronger and better voice”: Robert Alden, “Piaf Triumphant in Paris Recital,” New York Times, Feb. 23, 1963, p. 8; this includes the quotation from Le Monde.
6 “Like Napoleon”: Philippe Bouvard quoted in Bonini, p. 514.
7 “You know”: EP quoted in Noli, Edith, p. 153. Piaf omitted Patachou, also a great success in the States at this time.
8 “Edith is using”: Ibid., pp. 150–51.
9 “Lille is a horrible memory”: Bonel and Bonel, p. 303.
10 “Nothing happens”: Vendôme, in Notes, no. 153, p. 81.
11 “My Edith”: JC to EP, April 25, 1963, in Paris Match, no. 758, Oct. 19, 1963, p. 70.
12 “Vacations are great!”: EP quoted in France-Soir, June 7, 1963, in Duclos and Martin, p. 443.
13 “The doctors”: Simone Margantin quoted in Noli, Edith, p. 192.
14 “I had the impression”: EP quoted in ibid., pp. 193–94.
15 “It doesn’t keep him”: EP quoted in Duclos and Martin, p. 447.
16 “I suffered”: EP quoted in Noli, Edith, p. 204.
17 “I was happy”: Dumont interview with the author, June 28, 2008.
18 “They believe in reincarnation”: EP quoted in Noli, Edith, pp. 213–14.
19 “She goes from exaggerated”: Simone Margantin quoted in Noli, ibid., pp. 204–5.
20 “My dear”: EP quoted in Bonel and Bonel, p. 320.
21 rival accounts of her death: Danielle Bonel’s version of Piaf’s last days, given in Bonini, pp. 530–33, contradicts Margantin’s account, as quoted in Noli, Piaf, pp. 217–34; it emphasizes the role of the Bonels and devalues the role of the Noli-Vassal-Margantin clan. I have used elements from both when they seem compatible but have preferred Noli, as a source closer in time to the events.
22 “Edith Piaf burned herself”: Jean Cocteau quoted in Le Figaro, Oct. 12, 1963, p. 54.
23 “This tragedy”: Bonel and Bonel, p. 324.
24 “a public life”: L’Osservatore Romano quoted in Duclos and Martin, p. 449.
25 “A type of French song”: Jacques Enoch quoted in ibid., p. 450.
26 “She had a burial”: Quotations in this paragraph are from Noli, Edith, pp. 236, 239.
27 “The final curtain”: “Edith Piaf: Cette Fois le rideau est tombé,” Paris Match, Oct. 19, 1963, pp. 48, 55.
28 “Her Voice Will Never Die”: “Sa Voix ne mourra pas,” Paris Match, Oct. 26, 1963, pp. 51, 53.
29 “double loss”: Henry Giniger, “Double Loss to France,” New York Times, Oct. 12, 1963, p. 45.
30 “last confession”: EP letter published in France Dimanche, no. 896, Oct. 24, 1963. Piaf anticipated the language of this (apocryphal?) confession when dictating Ma vie: “What I would like is for those who have read my confession, who have heard everything, to say, as it was said of Mary Magdalene, ‘Her many sins will be forgiven, for she loved
greatly’ ” (p. 9).
31 “that freed her”: Aznavour quoted in preface to Noli, Piaf secrète, p, 11.
CODA
1 “There could be no better”: Raymond de Becker, in Arts, June 1964, quoted in Bonini, p. 559.
2 “I wish Edith’s memory”: Sarapo to Le Parisien libéré [1970], quoted in ibid., pp. 572–73.
3 “It wasn’t Cotillard”: André Schoeller quoted in ibid., p. 551.
4 “Piaf has been our lucky star”: Nathalie Lhermitte quoted in “Piaf est un porte-bonheur,” L’Union, Nov. 27, 2009.
5 “Edith”—a moody ballad: “Elle hante un curieux music-hall / Les feuilles des arbres la bissent / … / Sais-tu comment font les artistes / Pour ne pas rendre la mort plus triste / Qu’un ‘au revoir’ … / … / Des millions d’amants anonymes / Viennent y planter leur bouquet / C’est tout au fond du Père-Lachaise / Dans la section quatre-vingt-seize / Qu’elle a trouvé son dernier nid / Madame Lamboukas Edith / Dite ‘Piaf’ …” Leprest changed the actual section number of Piaf’s grave, quatre-vingt-dix-sept (ninety-seven), to quatre-vingt-seize (ninety-six) to rhyme with “Père-Lachaise”—an invocation of poetic license that would have met with Piaf’s approval.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
A great many books have been written about Edith Piaf, most of them in French. To grasp her sense of her life, I began by reading everything that Piaf wrote—her correspondence, her song lyrics, and her memoirs, both dictated toward the end of her life: Au bal de la chance, published during her lifetime, and Ma vie, published after her death. Because Piaf had a storyteller’s feel for the presentation of facts, it was necessary to compare these versions of her life (which sometimes contradict each other) with other sources, including her unpublished correspondence, especially the little-known letters to Jacques Bourgeat, her mentor, held at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.
In the decades following Piaf’s death, dozens of memoirs by contemporaries began to appear. The best known, and the most lurid, is a special case: Piaf, by Simone Berteaut, her sidekick during her years as a street singer in Paris. Though picturesque, Berteaut’s account must be used with caution. It sensationalizes the dark side of Piaf’s life, depicting significant scenes as if Berteaut had witnessed them although she was not present, claiming knowledge that she could not have possessed, and stating that Berteaut was not only the companion of her youth but also her half sister—an assertion denounced as false soon after the book’s publication, by Piaf’s real half sister, Denise Gassion (whose memoir, Piaf, ma soeur, unfortunately lacks the kind of vivid details provided by Berteaut). For this reason, I have made judicious use of Berteaut’s versions of Piaf’s rise to fame and, whenever possible, contextualized them with observations by others.
In this respect, memoirs by those who knew Piaf at different points have been invaluable. Maurice Maillet’s Piaf inconnue gives a piquant glimpse of her years among the small-time crooks of Pigalle, whose noir atmosphere is reflected in her early repertoire. Les Eperons de la liberté, by Paul Meurisse, who took Piaf to live in a posh part of Paris, gives a humorous and informative account of their time together at the start of World War II, a period fleshed out by Madame Billy’s La Maîtresse de “Maison,” on the later war years, when Piaf lived on the top floor of a high-class brothel.
Other reliable sources for this period and the postwar years include the journals of Maurice Chevalier and Jean Cocteau, the memoirs of Charles Aznavour, Micheline Dax, and Georges Moustaki, and, for the end of her life, accounts by Jean Noli, to whom Piaf dictated Ma vie, and Hugues Vassal, whom she allowed to photograph her in her most relaxed moments. In addition, recollections of Piaf by such figures as Jean-Louis Barrault included in Bernard Marchois’s Edith Piaf: Opinions publiques shed light on her life from a variety of angles, as does the compilation of reviews, clippings, and other related documents in Marchois’s Piaf: Emportée par la foule.
Claimants to the title of Piaf’s best friend and confidante arose some years after her death. They include Ginou Richer’s Mon amie Edith Piaf, which, like Berteaut’s memoir, illuminates Piaf’s high-spirited behavior with close friends but must also be used with caution, because of the author’s tendency to inflate her role in the star’s life. Many of Richer’s observations are contested by what is, on the whole, a more reliable source, Edith Piaf, le temps d’une vie, by Marc and Danielle Bonel, who were part of her entourage for decades and looked after her at the end of her life.
There are also dozens of biographies, both the traditional kind and the “vies romancées” (novelized lives) of the star, in French. Since the same stories and interpretations are often repeated from one book to another, I have compared their accounts for historical feasibility or verisimilitude and, when possible, retraced their sources—though this effort was hampered by the lack of footnotes in many French books, including those by Monique Lange, the next biography after Berteaut’s to reach an international readership following its publication in English. In the end, I found the most reliable of the many biographies to be Pierre Duclos and Georges Martin’s Piaf, which not only details sources to a considerable extent but also quotes significantly from her contemporaries, many of whom were alive during the time of its writing. I also relied on Jean-Dominique Brierre’s Piaf: Sans amour on n’est rien du tout, a useful summary of her place in the chanson tradition, which avoids most of the petty gossip found in other biographies. Emmanuel Bonini’s Piaf: La Vérité appeared when I had nearly completed my own book: a grab bag of information, it lacks notes and, in some cases, attributions, but provides helpful context concerning Piaf’s later years.
Like most books about Piaf published in France, the two biographies in English, by Margaret Crosland and David Bret, did not have access to the Piaf-Bourgeat correspondence, or to the letters from Piaf to other lovers that have come to light recently, nor do they appear to have drawn on accounts published in the popular press by her contemporaries. Their lives of the star, though sometimes useful, are hampered, in the case of Crosland, by the author’s expressions of disdain toward her subject’s lifestyle, and in the case of Bret, by the lack of attributions and the gossipy tone.
I have tried, whenever possible, to reconstruct Piaf’s contemporaries’ sense of her career by drawing on documents available at the Département des Arts du Spectacle of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand, the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris, the Bernay Office de Tourisme Archive, the Hugues Vassal Archive, and the Mazillier/Berrot Archive. Popular magazines from the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s also provided a sense of the changing contexts for individual songs and song styles, their meaning to Piaf’s audience, and their role in the development of the myth of the little sparrow as the voice of France.
I was also fortunate to be able to flesh out or confirm my findings in interviews with a number of Piaf’s contemporaries, including collaborators, co-performers, and intimates such as Georges Moustaki, Micheline Dax, and Charles Dumont, whose generosity and recall of precise detail added immeasurably to the task I set myself—to tell Piaf’s story from her perspective, one that mingled the rose with the noir in the unlikely tale of the spirited girl from the Paris slums who became one of the greatest voices of the twentieth century.
The following is a selected bibliography of the works that informed my research or appear in the notes.
EDITH PIAF MEMOIRS
Piaf, Edith. Ma vie: Texte recueilli par Jean Noli. Paris: Union Générale d’Editions, 1964. Trans. Margaret Crosland, My Life. London: Peter Owen, 1990.
———. Au bal de la chance. Paris: L’Archipel, 2003. Trans. Peter Trewartha, The Wheel of Fortune. London: Peter Owen, 1965.
PUBLISHED CORRESPONDENCE
Piaf, Edith, and Marcel Cerdan. Moi pour toi: Lettres d’amour. Paris: Cherche Midi, 2002.
Springer, Anne-Marie. Amoureuse et rebelle: Histoires d’amour et lettres inédites de Arletty, Edith Piaf, Albertine Sarrazin. Paris: Textuel, 2008.
B
IOGRAPHIES AND STUDIES OF EDITH PIAF
Berteaut, Simone. Piaf: A Biography. New York: Harper & Row, 1972.
Bonel, Marc, and Danielle Bonel. Edith Piaf: Le Temps d’une vie. Paris: De Fallois, 1993.
Bonini, Emmanuel. Piaf: La Vérité. Paris: Pygmalion, 2008.
Bret, David. Piaf: A Passionate Life. London: Robson Books, 1998.
Brierre, Jean-Dominique. Edith Piaf: Sans amour on n’est rien du tout. Paris: Hors Collection, 2003.
Cartier, Jacqueline, and Hugues Vassal. Edith et Thérèse: La Sainte et la pécheresse. Paris: A. Carrière, 1999.
Costaz, Gilles. Edith Piaf: Une Femme faite cri. Paris: Seghers, 1988.
Crosland, Margaret. Piaf. New York: Fromm, 1987.
Cuesta, Stan. Edith Piaf. Paris: Librio Musique, 1999.
Duclos, Pierre, and Georges Martin. Piaf. Paris: Seuil, 1993.
Gassion, Denise. Piaf, ma soeur. Paris: Guy Authier, 1977.
Grimault, Dominique, and Patrick Mahé. Piaf Cerdan: Un Hymne à l’amour 1946–1949. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1984.
Lange, Monique. Piaf. Trans. Richard S. Woodward. New York: Seaver, 1981.
Larue, André. Edith Piaf: L’Amour toujours. Paris: Editions Carrère/Michel Lafon, 1983.
Laurent, William. Edith Piaf. Paris: Loufrani, 1980.
Le Breton, Auguste. La Môme Piaf. Paris: Hachette, 1980.
Lévy, François. Passion Edith Piaf. Paris: Textuel, 2003.
Lorcey, Jacques, and Joëlle Monserrat. Piaf et la chanson. Paris: Séguier, 2007.
Maillet, Maurice. Edith Piaf inconnue. Paris: Euro-Images, 1970.
Marchois, Bernard. Edith Piaf: Opinions publiques. Paris: TF1, 1995.
———. Piaf: Emportée par la foule. Paris: Vade Retro, 1996.
Noli, Jean. Edith. Paris: Stock, 1973.
———. Piaf sécrète. Paris: L’Archipel, 1993.
Richer, Ginou. Mon amie Edith Piaf. Avignon: L’Instantané, 2004.
Routier, Marcelle. Piaf l’inoubliable. Paris: Renaudot, 1990.