No Regrets - Carolyn Burke [102]
The star’s Olympia engagement was the event of the 1958 winter season. The hall was full each night; people had to be turned away. When Bruno Coquatrix, the director, begged Edith to extend for another five weeks, she agreed—since her love affair with the public mattered more to her than her private life or her fragile health, which she liked to play down. After collapsing onstage in April, Piaf told the press that though doing three shows on Sundays tired her, she could not disappoint “the Sunday crowd.” She added, “They deserve more than the others. All week they dream of Sunday.” When Coquatrix again begged her to extend her run, she agreed to three more weeks. By the end of the engagement, she had performed 128 times for some two hundred and forty thousand spectators, and was back on a regimen of stimulants, barbiturates, and sleeping pills, followed each day by many cups of black coffee. “She wasn’t an addict, but she had pushed her luck for so long,” her manager said. “She needed stimulants to go on, tranquilizers to go to sleep. She wore herself out that way.”
In May, Piaf returned to Sweden with a suitcase full of pills and an entourage consisting of Loulou Barrier, Ginou Richer, and the star’s new lover, the twenty-five-year-old Jo (later Georges) Moustaki, an Alexandrine Greek who had moved to Paris as a youth. They had met that February, when the songwriter came to her apartment with his latest compositions. Moustaki’s shy charm made such an impression that she invited him to stay after her other guests went home; she beguiled him by playing the jazz songs she had brought back from the United States. “I was fascinated, I had no idea that a singer from another time might share my taste in music, which drew us together,” Moustaki recalled. By May, he had replaced the other men in her life. Combining her familiar roles as mentor, lover, and collaborator, Edith hoped to find the inspiration that she longed for in a relationship—love being the prerequisite and open-sesame to her creative renewal.
The star was so taken with her young lover that she paid little attention to upheavals in France. Since April, when the government fell, the warring political parties had been unable to form a coalition. A provisional cabinet was named in May. At the army’s urging, De Gaulle announced that he would take charge. In one of those odd coincidences, Piaf fell ill onstage in Stockholm on May 28, the day that the provisional cabinet resigned, and the next day flew to Paris in a chartered plane just as De Gaulle took power. Rather than focus on the crisis, the popular weekly Noir et Blanc ran a photo of the singer looking like the Madonna under the headline “Edith Piaf Gravement Malade?” (“Is Edith Piaf Gravely Ill?”).
With Moustaki and her entourage, she spent part of June recovering at the country house that she had recently bought near Paris. Moustaki tried to limit her drinking, but Ginou kept her supplied: “It was not exactly a dry period,” the younger woman recalled. About this time, Piaf wrote to Schoeller, who was on vacation in the Alps: she was bored, she missed his laughter. What she did not say was that her fatigue was still so great that she was battling depression. When the reporter Jean Noli came to interview her for France Dimanche, she declared, “If one day I can’t sing, I think I’ll shoot myself.” The best antidote for depression was music that refreshed her spirit. Moustaki’s new songs, “Eden Blues” and “Le Gitan et la fille,” were like a tonic, she continued—“full of the sun, faraway islands, passionate love.”
By July, Edith felt well enough to go on tour for the summer with her young lover. Snapshots of them on