No Regrets Read online

  Also by Carolyn Burke

  Lee Miller: A Life

  Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy

  This Is a Borzoi Book Published by Alfred A. Knopf

  Copyright © 2011 by Carolyn Burke

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf,

  a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by

  Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Burke, Carolyn.

  No regrets : the life of Edith Piaf / Carolyn Burke.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-59519-5

  1. Piaf, Edith, 1915–1963. 2. Singers—France—Biography. I. Title.

  ML 420.P52B85 2011

  782.42164092—dc22

  [B] 2010035229

  Jacket photograph: © Nicholas Tikhomiroff/Magnum Photos

  Jacket design by Chip Kidd

  v3.1

  For Georges Borchardt, and for Samuel Hynes

  My songs are my life. I don’t want to be nothing but a memory.

  —EDITH PIAF

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prelude

  CHAPTER ONE

  1915–1925

  CHAPTER TWO

  1926–1932

  CHAPTER THREE

  1933–1935

  CHAPTER FOUR

  1935–1936

  CHAPTER FIVE

  1937–1939

  CHAPTER SIX

  1939–1942

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  1942–1944

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  1944–1946

  CHAPTER NINE

  1946–1948

  CHAPTER TEN

  1948–1949

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  1949–1952

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  1952–1956

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  1956–1959

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  1959–1960

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  1961–1962

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  1963

  Coda

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Illustration Credits

  Permissions Acknowledgments

  Photo Insert

  PRELUDE

  That kid Piaf tears your guts out,” Maurice Chevalier was heard to say after watching the debut of the newcomer called “La Môme Piaf.” It was not yet apparent that nineteen-year-old Edith Gassion (her birth name) would become one of the greatest vocalists of the twentieth century—the “little sparrow” whose gut-wrenching tones would come to represent France to the French and touch listeners all over the world, whether or not they spoke her language.

  Piaf is often portrayed as a Gallic fusion of Billie Holiday and Judy Garland. Yet she was more feral than either and, like her friend Chevalier, more completely identified with le petit peuple—the “little people” to whose dreams she gave voice, whose adoration nourished her career from its inauspicious start in the Paris streets to her international fame: during her short life she would make ten tours of the United States, as well as numerous tours of Europe, Canada, and South America.

  “Edith Piaf knocked my socks off,” Joni Mitchell declared recently, “although I didn’t know what she was singing about.” Now, nearly five decades after Piaf’s death, she is known worldwide as the prototype of the singer who takes listeners to the edge of their seats. Piaf fascinates music lovers as an icon of “complete vocal abandon,” as the singer and recent Piaf interpreter Martha Wainwright put it—as someone whose “crackling emotion” washes over her audiences. Judging by the remarks of Mitchell and Wainwright, Piaf’s importance to contemporary singers is based on their response to her sensibility, the way her songs create the kind of urgency that has never gone out of style.

  Although Piaf’s contemporaries felt her wholehearted generosity and visceral power, they also saw her as an emblematic figure who combined in her persona contradictory aspects of icons like Joan of Arc and Thérèse of Lisieux, the singer’s patron saint, even as she lived out the short, wayward life for which she became famous. That the diminutive star compared herself to Mary Magdalene—hoping to be forgiven for loving often because she loved greatly—astounds those of us who are not from Catholic countries.

  Such comparisons were inevitable, given the paradigms for women during Piaf’s youth in the 1920s, her hand-to-mouth existence in the 1930s, and her rise to fame over the next decades. Women were either whores or madonnas in the popular imagination. Piaf’s many love affairs, as sensationalized in the press, evoked both archetypes, which in turn complicated her legend as the scrappy street singer who made her way out of the slums on the strength of her voice. Even now they may cause us to undervalue the musical intelligence with which she made her voice into a finely tuned instrument while nourishing her most enduring love affair, her intimacy with her audience.

  Despite cultural differences, comparisons to Billie Holiday and Judy Garland have some merit. Piaf’s legend appears to fit the template for successful artists who pay the price in their descent into suffering caused by drink, drugs, and, in the case of women, promiscuity. What is more, these three female vocalists, who died young after careers that were, to say the least, hectic, share an intensity, although Piaf’s origins among the “dangerous classes”—the outcasts among whom she and her acrobat father eked out a living—suggest that she had more in common with Holiday than with Garland. The French street urchin and the black American each transformed the clichés of ordinary speech into a bodily communion; their transports produced in admirers an almost ecstatic response. (From the start, however, Piaf was claimed by the masses in her country—unlike Holiday, whose style endeared her mainly to white jazz-lovers until after her death, when black audiences finally accepted her.)

  Piaf began as an interpreter of la chanson réaliste, the tradition of “realistic” song-stories about the downtrodden—often prostitutes or lovelorn women whose men desert them—but soon came to represent not only the French spirit as mirrored back to her compatriots but also the allure to the larger world of this fatalistic yet resilient stance. By the 1930s, an ideology of the “little guy” was in place in the French entertainment business. Chevalier and Mistinguett, his ever-popular former lover, were the golden couple of music-halls like the Folies Bergère, whose variety shows featured these insouciant icons of je-m’en-foutisme—the “I don’t give a damn” response to adversity. Just below these venues on the show-business ladder came cabarets of varying repute, and beneath them the working-class dives that represented a promotion for a former street singer like Piaf. Her early repertoire gave audiences a certain view of society, one in which la chanson réaliste told the truth about working-class lives and piqued the curiosity of artists like Jean Cocteau, who went slumming in the poorer quarters in search of artistic vision.

  Yet Piaf’s origins, while fascinating in their own right, do not explain her appeal to all levels of French society and, after World War II, to music lovers around the world. She came on the scene in 1935 with a voice that was already a powerful brass instrument. Over the next few years, when she no longer had to project to street crowds, she refined it—bringing greater subtlety to the lyrics and bringing out their meaning with her hands, which swooped majestically or fluttered like moths as she sang.

  Piaf’s velvety vibrato and guttural “r”s soon became the marks of her style, whether she sang of e
veryday tragedies or performed the light, comic numbers that are less well known outside France. Choosing songs primarily for their lyrics, she soon performed them with the “proper French” diction she learned from her mentors, Jacques Bourgeat and Raymond Asso, who taught her to live more fully within each tune. From then on, as her musical intelligence developed, there was never a word out of place, never a false gesture even as she sang of great truths (or platitudes). Oddly, given Piaf’s start as a spitfire, she perfected an art of sobriety, one that conveyed the rawness of deeply felt emotion yet retained a high degree of vocal purity.

  It is not often noted that it was Piaf’s sense of métier, the art of performance that comes with long experience, that underscored her poignant mix of vulnerability and defiance. “My song is my life,” she wrote when applying to join the French songwriters’ union. Yet the musical versions of her life that are still so completely identified with the singer were carefully selected, rehearsed, and polished for performance. Piaf played an active role in shaping all aspects of her recitals, from the accompaniments to the lighting to the order of each program. In the same way, she choreographed the publicity surrounding her appearances to cultivate her bond with the public that adored her and for that reason, she believed, should be allowed to know her own version of her unconventional life.

  Since Piaf’s death in 1963, she has never left the scene to which she devoted herself. Recordings, movies, theatrical presentations, biographies, and versions of her songs by others are too numerous to mention, except, perhaps, for Olivier Dahan’s recent biopic, La Môme (La Vie en rose outside France), which gives a colorful account of her picaresque childhood. But this much-admired film also resorts to the familiar template for an artist’s life—the trajectory from rags to riches with the emphasis on the sorrows (especially the addictive ones) that lead to the performer’s downfall. Such commonly held myths do a disservice by thinning the texture of a life. What is worse, they perpetuate themselves in the public mind, causing us to distort the legend of the artist at the expense of her artistry.

  The cliché of Piaf as self-destructive waif is too rigid to allow for her complex humanity. Its morality-play version of her life neglects or completely ignores her courage in World War II, when she defied the Nazis by sheltering Jewish friends and aiding the Resistance. In the same way, many accounts of her life say little about her mentoring of younger singers like Yves Montand and Charles Aznavour, preferring instead to shape her story by calling them “the men in her life”—each of whom gets a chapter, as if her existence had been organized around theirs.

  Nor does this template elucidate her role as a lyricist. Piaf wrote nearly one hundred songs, which were set to music by trusted collaborators like Marguerite Monnot, with whom she formed the first female songwriting team. (According to myths still in circulation, Piaf had little affection for women, a reading of her life that ignores her close friendships with protégées, members of her entourage, and peers like Monnot and actresses Micheline Dax and Marlene Dietrich.)

  Finally, myths about her life neglect Piaf’s ongoing role as a muse who worked tirelessly with her collaborators. Her artistic family included both the musicians and songwriters with whom she devised melodies to embody her persona, and cultural figures like Jean Cocteau, who wrote plays for her, and the choreographer Pierre Lacotte, who created a ballet in homage to the star and to the city with which she is so completely identified. For it was in Paris that the diminutive sparrow became France’s nightingale (Cocteau’s phrase), then—following her recovery from near-fatal illness in 1959—its phoenix, its symbol of resurrection.

  FITTINGLY, it was in Paris that I first heard Piaf’s throaty tremor, in the maid’s room I occupied in exchange for English lessons. Often, after climbing seven flights of stairs, I fell onto the bed and turned on the radio to hear her latest hit. In the fall of 1959, when I was studying at the Sorbonne and Piaf was pursuing what the press called her suicide tour, France was gripped by the Algerian War, then being waged in the casbahs of Algiers and the streets of Paris. Unclear about the issues but aware that bombs were exploding in public places, I retreated to my attempt to learn French by singing along with Piaf.

  According to my teacher, her sharp diction and phrasing could not be improved upon, but she had learned them the hard way, having grown up with the parigot accent of the slums. This meant little to me, except that I was determined to get my tongue around those piquant sounds. Singing my way through her repertoire, I acquired a tolerable accent and a set of emotions I had not yet personally experienced, as if French culture had entered me viscerally by means of her music.

  On my return to Paris in 1961, I learned that Piaf’s phoenixlike revival had occurred earlier that year: she had found the strength to perform the inspirational “Non, je ne regrette rien,” which was still resounding on the air. That winter I chanted her song as if it were the national anthem, doing my best to imitate her flurry of “r”s, her stress on the repeated negatives (the nons), her crystalline voicing of a stance that fuses acceptance with the will to survive. I did not fully grasp the song’s reverberations in a time of unrest, yet felt its talismanic power along my pulse.

  When I thought about Piaf’s repertoire years later, it became clear to me that, unlike the tunes I had danced to as a teenager in the 1950s, la chanson réaliste treated songs as slices of life from the lower depths. These gritty stories dwell on the magnetic but often disappointing outcome of sensual experience, on the conflict between dreams of perfect love and their undoing, and, often, on resilience as the only response to life’s woes. Because chanson lyrics were usually penned before their music, Piaf’s tradition was closer to poetry—allowing the singer to depict an entire destiny, from promising start to tragic dénouement. Since the resurgence of interest in the art of cabaret in the United States and elsewhere, she is now seen as its foremost interpreter.

  Starting work on this biography, I was pleased to learn that Piaf’s melodies were again being sung by scores of interpreters in France and around the world: in Australia, where I spend part of the year; in Japan, where her acceptance of the ephemeral is embraced by a culture that values intimations of feelings; and in the many countries where each new singer with raw emotional power is compared with Piaf, the tradition’s gold standard.

  In 2006, I contacted L’Association des Amis d’Edith Piaf, a group of her admirers based in Paris, who introduced me to the scattered, often contradictory, sources available there and to their repository of Piafiana. My idea was to place her short, passionate life in its artistic and social contexts, while also exploring the myths that have grown up around it—an approach that will, I trust, reintroduce the singer to English-speakers for whom French culture seems ungraspably alluring, yet who find themselves moved by Piaf without knowing why.

  I have been fortunate in having unparalleled access to sources that illuminate the multiple facets of her life, beginning with the recently released correspondence between the star and Jacques Bourgeat, her mentor, at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, where I also consulted their extensive clipping files on her early years. While I was writing this book, more of Piaf’s correspondence came to light: her letters to four of her lovers—Norbert Glanzberg, Takis Horn, Tony Frank, and Toto Gérardin—which help to situate her amours in the context of her career rather than the other way around. (Nonetheless, it has, at times, been a dizzying task to keep track of her many lovers.) In France I was also introduced to collectors whose archives allowed me to see rare Piaf material, including home movies and recordings unavailable elsewhere, and to discuss with them our fascination with the singer whose identification with their country means that she remains very much alive there.

  Synchronistic encounters with people who shared their memories and introduced me to others who had known Piaf or heard her sing made it seem that I was being drawn into her life—as in 2007, when I visited the former brothel in Bernay, the Norman town where she lived as a child, and attended a memorial to
her in Père-Lachaise, her burial place, on the anniversary of her death. During the mass, which included Piaf’s renditions of “Mon Dieu” and “Hymne à l’amour,” I sensed that her songs often wed earthly to spiritual aspirations, that the religion of love espoused in them still reverberates for all who are touched by her credo. (At the next year’s memorial, the priest referred to me as “l’australienne, celle qui est venue de loin”—the Australian, the one who came from far away—for the occasion.)

  Over the course of the three years I spent completing this biography, I was often asked whether I had been inspired by La Môme and what I thought of it. Dahan’s film allowed audiences around the world to feel the fierce purity of Piaf’s voice, I replied. But it had been standing at her grave with her fans and relations that moved me to write a book in homage to the little star who taught me her language and, in the process, gave me a more generous view of her life, and of my own.

  CHAPTER ONE

  1915–1925

  Edith Piaf’s life began like a latter-day version of Les Misérables. A poor girl from the Paris slums, she grew up among the downtrodden souls who later populated her lyrics and, through their mythic resonance, shaped the scenarios of twentieth-century French culture. Her story is the stuff of working-class legend, its joys and sorrows the materials for her heart-stopping songs. From these impoverished beginnings, she kept her cheeky street sense and gaiety of spirit while reinventing herself as the chanteuse who reached across social, linguistic, and national divides to voice the emotions of ordinary people.

  Though mythic, Piaf’s childhood was no fairy tale. Because the few known facts about her inauspicious beginnings are entwined with the legends that she and others cultivated once she became famous, it is often impossible to separate fact from fiction—an ambition that is probably beside the point, since her art and legend nourish each other, circling back to the streets where she got her start. Au bal de la chance (1958) and Ma vie (1964)—accounts of her life dictated to others—must be complemented by interviews with Piaf and her friends to help us grasp the contexts for the legends that grew up around her.