No Regrets - Carolyn Burke [104]
Five days after Piaf’s triumphant return to the Empire Room on January 25, they quarreled. Moustaki left for Florida the next day; Edith wrote to André Schoeller, “It’s over.… It had to end some time, you were right, all too right. Here I am without a man. I think it’s the first time this has happened to me.” She had not told him about Moustaki until then because of her scruples, “but this time I was wrong!” After finishing the letter, she implored her manager: “Loulou, trouve-moi quelqu’un de gentil” (“Loulou, find me somebody nice”).
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
1959–1960
Whether or not they knew French, Piaf’s audiences at the Empire Room responded viscerally to the chanteuse. “Edith Piaf never lets you down,” a critic wrote after her opening. Her voice “hits you right in the heart. It is pulsating, penetrating, like no other I’ve heard. There were times when Piaf, in all her power, sounded like an organ and a whole orchestra combined.” New Yorkers hung on her every word as she sang the rapturous “La Foule,” which he called “a sad tale of a girl who lost her lover in a crowd.” Like most of her songs, it seemed to come straight out of her life. “As I look back through years of night clubbing,” the critic concluded, “I realize there are only a few genuine artists among the performers.… Edith Piaf is among the few, if not the only one.”
Loulou Barrier must have been relieved when a nice young man of the sort that Edith asked him to find showed up at her stage door soon after Moustaki’s departure. Douglas Davis, a fresh-faced Southern portraitist who hoped to start a celebrity series with a likeness of the singer, had studied at the Grande Chaumière art academy in Paris. While there, he had fallen in love with Edith’s voice, he said; it was the most beautiful he had ever heard. The star agreed to sit for the young man, whose French was as good as his manners. Each afternoon, as Davis worked on her portrait, he told her tales of life in Atlanta, where he first studied art: one of his commissions had been a painting of Jesus surrounded by children of all races, for a Baptist church.
Edith’s entourage wagered that “Dougy” would soon replace Moustaki. At thirty, the artist was just thirteen years younger than Piaf, and though he lacked machismo (they assumed that he was gay), “it was as if homosexuality didn’t matter,” Danielle Bonel recalled. “Provided the person didn’t wear high heels or feather boas, she ignored it.” What was more, Edith was charmed by Doug’s attentions (he brought her violets). She began appearing in public with him as her new companion.
Within a short time, their romance was interrupted by the deterioration of her health. On February 16, she ran from the stage to the bathroom, spat up blood, and fainted. The doctor who examined her concluded that she had a bleeding ulcer caused by the quantity of medicines she took for her arthritis and other ailments. Two days later, she felt well enough to sing, but again left the Empire Room in mid-performance. On February 24, after two blood transfusions, she was taken to Presbyterian Hospital because the ulcer was still hemorrhaging. Her surgeon operated immediately. “She’s indomitable,” Barrier wrote Bourgeat. “This morning she was teasing the doctors.… No fear whatsoever. Last night she chatted until 3 a.m., like a parakeet.”
The operation was successful, but the star had to be hospitalized for a month. When she regained consciousness, Edith smiled at Danielle Bonel and said to tell their friends in France not to worry. Noir et blanc informed readers that Piaf longed to see Paris again and ran another photo of the star in a Madonna-like mantle, her