No Regrets - Carolyn Burke [103]
Their song, which revived the whore-with-a-heart-of-gold trope, became one of her greatest successes. “‘Milord’ was typical of its time,” Moustaki explained, “with a marked contrast between verse and refrain, major and minor passages, waltz, Charleston, and fox-trot rhythms—like a classical composition with different movements.” Piaf had the gift, he said years later, “of knowing how to nourish creativity in others.”
Though the young man’s sense of popular music was acute, he was not, in Piaf’s opinion, ready to perform his own songs. During a joint radio broadcast, she interrupted his rendition of one of them to show how it should be done. “You have to give more of yourself,” she said. “When we come back from America … you’ll be ready, but until then it’s better not to think of performing.” In time, Moustaki understood that Piaf had been as demanding with him as she was with herself. “She wanted to be the best,” he observed, “not from ambition but as her calling, a somewhat mystical sense that she couldn’t do things by halves. Onstage you gave everything; when singing you kept nothing for yourself; when writing you didn’t stop until you had given your best.”
Piaf recorded two of Moustaki’s songs a few days before they were to fly to New York, in September, for her second engagement at the Empire Room. Driving to Paris from the country the day before their flight (Moustaki at the wheel, Piaf beside him), they hit a large truck head-on. The star was rushed to the hospital. She had lost consciousness, two tendons in her arm were severed, her lip had to be sutured. The U.S. trip was canceled.
A month later, after her convalescence in the country, they had a second accident at the same spot, with Moustaki again at the wheel. At first Edith seemed to be relatively unharmed—she managed to appear at Aznavour’s opening night at the Alhambra, with Moustaki at her side—but she had to spend the autumn recovering from the two accidents. They were a warning from heaven, she believed, and her survival was “a miracle.” By the new year, her lip, which was healing slowly, still hurt when she opened her mouth wide. “My life is over,” she told France Dimanche. “I can’t sing any more; I can’t bite into the words.” But, with her entourage in the wings, she bit into “Milord” at a test recital in Rouen. The standing ovation for Moustaki’s song convinced her that she had been right about his talent. After a series of concerts in France, Tunis, and Algiers, she felt ready to fly to the United States on January 6, 1959.
Moustaki had little to do but observe Piaf’s New York life there. He had the satisfaction of hearing her sing “The Gypsy and the Lady,” an English version of his “Le Gitan et la fille,” when Ed Sullivan welcomed her back to his program in January as “the most amazing ninety-seven pounds in show business.” This operatic cry, in the voice of a Gypsy who begs his love to let him prove his devotion, may have given the young man pause, especially when she intoned, “No price is too high.” Yet Edith was being an angel, Barrier told Bourgeat: “She’s made a marvelous comeback, and as a result I now feel quite optimistic about her 1959 U.S. season.”
Looking back, Moustaki recalled that onstage the star was transfigured. “She could breathe there, she was at home, she constructed her own world. If she felt ill in the wings, she felt better once she went on. She couldn’t not sing. All she cared about was her songs. Nothing else.