No Regrets - Carolyn Burke [101]
Edith could not bear to be without a man for long. A new candidate for her affections was at hand in Félix Marten. Still, while drawing him into her circle, she was also having an affair with the art dealer André Schoeller and flirting with the photographer Hugues Vassal. That winter, Edith’s private life resembled a French farce, with men stashed in different rooms of her apartment, and accomplices pressed into service to keep them from meeting. Edith enjoyed each man’s company, while playing them against one another as if it were just a game.
Marten, although reluctant to give himself completely to Piaf, saw the advantages in a liaison with the star. As his mentor, she intended to to leaven his mocking air with a touch of charm: “He should sing the way Cary Grant acts in movies, with a sort of tender irony,” she told the broadcaster who interviewed them together. One can hear her trying to convince herself that Marten had more going for him than was apparent: “I think he has personality. No, I don’t think so, I’m sure.” Marten stayed until the end of her extended Olympia run but did not play a big part in Piaf’s life: “Like so many others,” a friend observed, “he passed through like a comet.”
André Schoeller, who was also married, had long had a crush on Piaf. This suave young man—he was twenty-nine and she forty-two when they met—became her lover in the winter of 1958. Schoeller, known as “Dédé,” introduced Piaf to modern art; it became her passion. Her entourage thought that she lacked much feeling for the Russian abstractionist Lanskoy, but his work appeared in her salon thanks to Schoeller’s enthusiasm for the artist. They tried to be discreet about their liaison by going out in public with her entourage, but one night Schoeller hid in an armoire when Marten showed up. Edith was always in good spirits, Schoeller recalled: she drank only Carlsberg beer, and took mood stabilizers but no other drugs. “She was a healthy woman,” he insisted in the face of myths about her addictions. What was more, “With her I encountered love in all its splendor, its purity. That’s what it was, splendor, she had that in her, you saw it each time she sang.… I loved talking to her, sleeping with her, I loved her company. With her you became more than yourself.”
If Piaf’s romantic nature prevailed in trysts with Schoeller, it was her mischievous side that had won Hugues Vassal’s heart the previous year, when France Dimanche sent him to photograph her in Dijon. Sizing up the skinny twenty-four-year-old, the star asked him to help her by telling Liébrard to disappear while she dined with Marten and, since he looked as if he would appreciate a meal, invited him to join them. On Vassal’s return to Paris, he became part of the group that gathered nightly at the Boulevard Lannes to wait for Edith to appear from her bedroom; meanwhile, they were served dinner by Suzanne and took their places in the salon. “Thanks to this little circle,” Vassal wrote, “Edith could finally play the part of the spoiled child, a priceless luxury for a woman whose past had been marked by so much drama.” With the group, he watched the parade of men who at various times slept in her bed: “We were there to help, in silence, to give her our support—that was our only merit, one that didn’t cost much, since the mere fact that Edith relied on us was recompense enough.”
Vassal became the star’s favorite photographer—her confidant and co-conspirator in the press’s handling