No Regrets - Carolyn Burke [105]
Piaf weighed just under eighty pounds when she left the hospital in April. She would soon resume her career, she told the journalists awaiting her appearance. By May, she found the strength to perform in Washington (to pay her hospital bills) and Montreal (for airplane tickets to France), while also making television appearances. “Edith Piaf’s recent serious illness has not left scars on her artistry,” the New York Times wrote when she sang a rousing “Padam” for the “Springtime in Paris” evening on The Voice of Firestone. “Of course it was not nearly enough,” the critic continued, “but it did serve to give reassurance that the chanteuse has lost none of [her] dramatic intensity.” And, despite her anger at Moustaki, who flew to Paris after telling her that he wanted to be his own man, she performed “Milord” on the May 31 Ed Sullivan show, ending her former lover’s composition with vigorous sweeps of her hands and spirited clapping—as if to mark her return to full self-command.
By June, Edith felt well enough to appear at Carnegie Hall as honorary chair of a jazz concert to benefit the Sidney Bechet Cancer Fund following the musician’s recent death. The next day, she flew to Atlanta with Doug Davis to meet his parents. “She was very frail, she took pills all day long,” Doug’s sister Darlene recalled years later, still touched by Edith’s endearing ways. On learning that the girl from the Paris slums had always wanted to pick a ripe peach, the family took her to an orchard. “That was her heart’s delight,” Darlene continued. Entranced by Doug’s Southern drawl, which had come back in force, and his devotion—a new experience for her in amorous relations—Edith told Marguerite Monnot, “There was so much love in his eyes … one would die for it. It’s a pure, ineffable, unreal kind of love.”
The press was waiting when the couple stepped off the plane at Orly on June 20. “What have you brought from America?” they asked. Piaf’s reply—“An American!”—prompted the usual speculation about her love life, including a gossipy piece entitled “Piaf Likes ’Em Either Very Tall or Very Strong.” (At six feet three, Davis topped the list of the very tall.) “This tiny little woman likes to feel protected,” the article concluded. In a more serious vein, Piaf explained that with Davis she at last understood “that a man could give me something even before knowing me.… When I was in hospital he spent two hours on the subway every day to bring me violets and chocolates.… I hope that this is the real thing.”
The singer’s tenderhearted companion was “exactly the kind of man I need and love,” she told Moustaki in a letter intended to demonstrate her forgiveness. Though she no longer loved the composer, he could rely on her friendship: “What I need now is a very calm, orderly life, which in any case would not have suited you,” she wrote with a touch of bad faith.
Davis soon learned that, despite Piaf’s wish for calm, it was hopeless to think that she would change. Her entourage made bets about how long “le doux Dougy” would survive the demands of being her escort on her summer tour. At her first engagement, in Monte Carlo, he watched the theater fill with celebrities (Gary Cooper, Elizabeth Taylor, Eddie Fisher, Aristotle Onassis), who leapt to their feet when Piaf sang “Milord.” After the performance, the star “fell literally into the arms of Douglas Davis, the young painter