No Regrets - Carolyn Burke [0]
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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