No Regrets - Carolyn Burke [10]
The few children whose families traveled with the circus played together after their chores were done. During a game of hide-and-seek, Edith hid in the space between the lions’ cages, within reach of their claws. After some time a search party, including her father and the lion tamer, found her and ordered her to tiptoe out without disturbing the beasts. “I was so afraid of getting punished that I made Papa promise not to beat me,” Piaf told a journalist. Her father agreed, but once she was safe, he went back on his word.
Had Louis Gassion been able to control his temper, his career might have taken off, she believed. Calling himself an “antipodean” acrobat (he stood on his head) or a “cosmopolitan” contortionist (he traveled widely), Louis twisted himself into strange shapes—the head-seat (a head-to-buttocks backbend), the human knot (legs behind the neck), extreme splits, and perilous handstands—while awed audiences held their breath. With more care, Piaf thought, he could have joined the Medrano Circus, the home of the clowns and acrobats who, since the 1900s, had inspired artists like Cocteau and Picasso. (At this time, the Medrano already had a contortionist called the King of Vertigo: he maneuvered on a chair balanced in the neck of a bottle that was itself perched on a ten-foot pole.)
But Louis was not one to take pains, nor could he submit to discipline for long. Edith’s time with the circus ended abruptly when her father walked out in a fit of anger, sold the trailer, and headed back to France with his daughter. “We kept on traveling,” Piaf recalled, “staying in hotels instead of the trailer, and my father became his own boss. Mine too, of course.”
The lives of itinerant entertainers are nearly impossible to document—they lived in defiance of social norms, a tribe of outcasts with its own rules and freedoms. The scenery changed as Gassion père et fille toured the country, yet one day was much like another. The high point was always Louis’s performance. “Father spread his ‘hanky’ (his mat) on the ground, gave his spiel, and went through his routine,” Piaf recalled. He told onlookers to show their appreciation to his daughter, who would pass among them before doing le saut périlleux. One day bystanders complained that saltimbanques were liars: the little girl had not done the perilous jump, as promised. Louis came up with a neat reply. Surely they didn’t want the child, who was weak from the flu, to risk breaking her neck—they would be satisfied by hearing her sing.
At this point in telling the story of her life, Piaf forgot her evenings on the café table in Bernay. “I had never sung before,” she said decades later. “The only song I knew was ‘La Marseillaise.’ ” This patriotic choice can be seen as a reframing of her “first” performance, in the years when France was recovering from the Great War. But it is of interest to note that as a fledgling performer in 1936, Piaf told a journalist that she had sung “L’Internationale”—then the anthem of communist and socialist parties worldwide. Whichever song she performed that night, they took in twice as much money as usual.
From then on, Louis made sure that Edith sang at the close of each show. She learned several new songs, including the popular “Nuits de Chine.” One wonders if audiences noticed the incongruity of a pre-pubescent child’s crooning this racy fox-trot, which evoked opium-drenched delights in exotic settings: “Nuits de Chine / Nuits calines / Nuits d’amour / Nuits d’ivresse” (Chinese nights / Caressing nights / Sensual nights / Intoxicating nights”). Perhaps this strangeness only enhanced the song’s appeal.
Piaf recalled only a few names and details of their travels in the next few years. At Lens, a town in northern France where they stopped on the way from Belgium to Normandy, the little girl spied a “rich child’s” doll in a toy shop: “She held out her little porcelain hands to me. I