No Regrets - Carolyn Burke [111]
Edith left the stage for a glass of water. By the awed looks on her friends’ faces, she saw that she had won their hearts just as she had won the audience’s. “I think it’s working,” she said modestly. There would be twenty-two curtain calls. Coquatrix told her that he had never seen anything like what had just happened—four thousand people enraptured in a collective love fest.
Three days later, for Piaf’s gala performance, show business celebrities came to pay their respects. Film directors Claude Chabrol and Roger Vadim sat with actors Alain Delon, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean-Claude Brialy, and Johnny Hallyday, the teenage pop star known as the French Elvis. The actresses Michèle Morgan, Romy Schneider, and Piaf’s old rival Arletty joined them, as did her former lover Félix Marten, who shouted, “Men, on your feet!” when she sang “Milord.” At the end of the performance, Louis Armstrong, in the audience that night, was heard to say that Piaf had ripped his heart out; Duke Ellington presented himself at her dressing-room door as a jazz musician who wanted to say bravo.
If there had been any doubt in Edith’s mind about her status as national icon, they were dispelled that evening. “I adore her,” an awestruck Johnny Hallyday murmured. He would later acknowledge her influence on his generation, the young French singers who absorbed her emotional style even when it seemed at odds with rhythms inspired by American rock, jazz, and blues. Dumont, whose successful career as a songwriter dates from her Olympia triumph, reflected years later, “Edith was the lynch-pin between an earlier time, starting with the chanson réaliste, and the new generation of singers in France—the end of the old era and the start of the new.” What was more, at that precise moment, she personified the Gallic way of meeting adversity in her belief that there was no reason to regret the past, no reason at all.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
1961–1962
In the new year, the main topics of interest among Parisians were Algeria and Edith Piaf. As De Gaulle prepared a referendum on Algerian independence despite widespread opposition, the press was glad to have something positive to report: Piaf’s phoenixlike resuscitation. An observer wrote of her Olympia concert, “It wasn’t the dying woman of last year, the pitiful, staggering one with a swollen face, but the Edith Piaf of ten years ago.” The star could now support those who had given her support in the past, like Bruno Coquatrix: “He was nearly ruined.… Edith was all but penniless, her illnesses and friends having used up what she had. Now they’re both saved.” She was a “miraculée” turned miracle-maker, her recovery an example for all.
For the rest of 1961, as violent conflicts between Algerian separatists and their opponents brought the war home and sporadic bombings terrorized Paris, “Non, je ne regrette rien” was played and replayed on the radio, as if Piaf’s voice evoked a national consensus. “This powerful emotive force,” a historian writes, “was further enhanced by the unlimited popular belief in Piaf’s ability to crystallize the deepest wishes of the human heart.” To Le Figaro she was the voice of France itself: “More than ever, Edith Piaf strikes us as one of those mythical beings toward whom a large class of people, or an entire era, channels its own frenzy.”
After three-quarters of the voters in metropolitan France approved De Gaulle’s referendum, he began preparing for Algerian independence despite the opposition of that country’s colonial population, the pieds-noirs, or “black feet,” whose hostility to plans for a Muslim-led country would continue to fuel the conflict. In April, a putsch by rebellious army generals marked