When I tell my friends that I’m a fan of Edith Piaf, I often get a blank look, or a smile, or a comment that they prefer it without celery. So I remind them of the movie Inception (which they’ve usually seen, the number of viewings rising in proportion to their geekiness), and the parts where Leonardo DiCaprio wakes from chemical dreams to the brassy thrum of a French voice singing, Non, rien de rien, non je ne regrette rien. That’s Edith Piaf, I say, and DiCaprio’s dead wife is played by Marion Cotillard, who won an Academy Award for her portrayal of Piaf in the 2007 film La Vie en Rose (known in France as La Mome). And, yes, at this point the geek shoe is definitely on the other foot, but good movies will do that to you; films have a way of turning casual interests into full-blown obsessions, even more so when a subject comes with its own gut-wrenching soundtrack.
In my favorite scene from La Mome, little Edith Gassion wanders blind and bandaged through the halls of her grandmother’s Paris brothel, past the ragged filles de joie (the French call their prostitutes “daughters of joy”), past the leering clients. Il ne se passe jamais rien pour moi (Nothing ever happens to me), sings Edith’s adult self, the woman who has already risen from the slums to become la Mome Piaf (the little sparrow), an international celebrity and icon of French culture. But the viewer knows, watching this tiny girl stumble through the dark, that pretty much everything will happen to Edith, if has hasn’t already, and that out of the gloomy rooms of a Belleville brothel will come some of the great French songs of the 20th century.
Even without soundtracks, though, books can achieve things that films can’t—a greater measure of historical accuracy, for instance, though often at the cost of a good story. Carolyn Burke’s new biography of Piaf, No Regrets, tells the tale well, but it also expands and corrects much of the dramatic content in La Vie en Rose. The author’s genuine passion for her subject started when she was living as a student in Paris during the Fifties. Burke’s teacher recommended Piaf’s pronunciation of the French language—”her sharp diction and phrasing could not be improved upon.” Burke worked to get her tongue “around those piquant sounds”; only later would she learn just how hard Piaf herself had worked to lose her own “parigot accent of the slums.” After the brothel years, Edith had traveled in a circus wagon with her father (he was a contortionist and acrobat), and helped out the act by singing “La Marseillaise” and the occasional socialist anthem while he walked on his hands or rested his head on his tuxedoed buttocks. Later she sang on her own in the streets, belting out songs about abandoned prostitutes, lost loves, unhappy soldiers—the “chansons realistes” that were popular then, especially among women. In her early twenties, Edith moved to the notorious neighborhood of Pigalle and took up with the gangsters who controlled the clubs where she performed, sometimes for nothing but a glass of wine. Though she avoided outright prostitution, she did what was necessary for self-preservation, and one assumes that was a lot.
It wasn’t until the murder of her first legitimate champion, the impresario Louis LePlee (who christened her “La Piaf”), that she broke with her lowlife friends and left the streets for good. Longing to improve herself, Edith sought out the musician/songwriter Raymond Asso and asked him to teach her how to speak, how to act, how to be. Burke quotes Piaf: “I was saved …. It took him three years to cure me. Three years of patient affection to teach me that there was another world beyond that of prostitutes and pimps. Three years to cure me … of my chaotic childhood.”
And to what extent was she cured? Edith’s early wounds had touched her in the deepest places. The abandonment by her mother, her father’s coldness and philandering, the loss of her own baby daughter, her experiences in Pigalle—she never recovered completely from the deprivations and excesses of her youth. Though all her life she turned to God for help, she consciously mixed her Catholic faith with her own religion of romantic love, moving from one adored toi to another in a long parade of vous, always proclaiming eternal faith to her new lover, but never able to stay faithful for long. When Edith discovered the song “Rien de Rien,” she declared it the theme of her life: “I regret nothing, it’s paid, swept away, forgotten—I say the hell with the past.” But another song she made famous, “Padam,” probably came closer to the truth:
This is a song that always says “You’re to blame,”
and I drag it behind me like
a strange mistake.
It knows my life by heart and says
“Remember your loves,
and when it’s your turn to ache
remember there’s no reason not to weep
with your arms full of regret.”
Edith had plenty to regret; there was enough scandal in her life to fill two or three drugstore paperbacks, the kind I take on terrifying plane rides (which is all of them). But this isn’t that kind of book. Burke determines to focus on Piaf the artist and musician. Here was a woman, after all, who composed great songs of her own, including “La Vie en Rose” and “Hymne a l’Amour”; who mentored younger singers, including Yves Montand and Georges Moustaki; and who worked tirelessly to perfect every element of her performances, from the slightest hand gesture to the details of light and orchestration. Yet writers, fans, and even old friends who reminisce on film tend to focus on the personal dramas, “the cliché of Piaf as self-destructive waif,” according to Burke. Her biography is reduced to a story with the chapters devoted to the “men in her life … as if her existence had been organized around theirs.”
Burke brings welcome attention back to Piaf’s music, providing both French and English lyrics for the songs she discusses, as well as background and context on the writers Edith worked with (as I wrote this essay, I listened to a perfectly decent compilation, eternelle edith Piaf, but there are several good ones to choose from). We find out that Edith nurtured songwriters, and that they in turn wrote for her, drawing on her biography for inspiration. We also hear about her courage: she supported Jewish artists during the Occupation, for instance, and refused to defend herself against press criticism over her concerts for French pows in Germany, though her visits were really cover for Resistance activities.
The Piaf who emerges from this version of her life is the musician who ignored pain and personal setbacks in the pursuit of her craft. Music, Edith said, was her life and her calling. Even near the end, when she suffered from liver disease and was barely able to walk from the pain of arthritis, she appeared on stage, lifted her hands as she always did, and gave radiant performances of “L’Accordeoniste,” “La Foule,” and so many other classics.
It can feel lonely to love a great singer from an earlier epoch. You want to tell people about your obsession, but you don’t want to be a bore, especially a bore in a foreign language, which is particularly boring. When I’m not writing essays about Edith Piaf, I mainly keep her music to myself, earphones on, lips shut, lest my private joy become a public sorrow. That’s why it made me so happy the other day to go on YouTube and find this in the comments under one of Edith’s last performances:
Thank you Madame! I’m thirteen and Piaf changed the way i listen to music. Before i would fill my head with Such nonsense like Lady Gaga Kesha and Glee crap. But Now i listen to Edith Piaf Yves Montand Serge Gainsbourg etc. Merci Madame! you changed my life.
D’accord.
Betty Smartt Carter writes fiction and essays and teaches Latin in Alabama.
Copyright © 2011 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
