No Regrets - Carolyn Burke [112]
Meanwhile, the star was news in her adopted country, where her record albums continued to sell widely. The New York Times ran a long article on the resurrection of the “Sparrow Kid” by a reporter who had attended one of her Olympia concerts. Piaf’s life, he wrote, was “a cliché of the Paris pavements.… But whether the story is true to the last agonizing misfortune, Parisians and the French in general take it to be true. The myth is larger than the woman. To Piaf fans, the question of where fact and fancy blur becomes wholly unimportant when she starts to sing.” Though “a frail old woman” (she was forty-five), Piaf “belts them out like Joe DiMaggio,” an American in the audience declared, provoking a Frenchwoman to reply, “She’s not singing to you.… She’s confessing.”
Piaf’s unofficial canonization lasted until the press began speculating about her relations with Dumont. To quell insinuations, she stopped singing “T’es l’homme qu’il me faut”—a song co-written with the composer, who was thought to be its addressee. It went: “J’ai eu beau chercher / Je n’ai rien trouvé / Pas un seul défaut / T’es l’homme, t’es l’homme, t’es l’homme / … qu’il me faut.” (“I looked in vain / Didn’t find a thing / Not a single flaw / You’re the man, you’re the man, you’re the man / … I need.”) Paris-Presse wrote, predictably, “There’s a new man in Edith Piaf’s life.… If her Olympia comeback was spectacular, it’s because she’s in love.” Dumont’s presence at her side on the television show Discorama showed her feelings for him, the writer continued; her glances at him as she sang their songs were proof of her devotion.
Dumont, who was married and had children, was not her type, Edith protested. Besides, she no longer cared for love: she had suffered too much. Her denials did not persuade those who were intent on seeing her as a marriage-wrecker. “We were very close, but I was not Edith’s lover,” Dumont maintained, yet their intimacy colors the more than twenty songs he composed for her and the ten they wrote together. Her trust in him is apparent in their reprise of her romance with Cerdan, “La Belle Histoire d’amour,” which ends, rather predictably, with the lovers’ reunion in heaven. Soon Piaf insisted that Dumont become her singing partner. In their contrapuntal performance of “Les Amants,” which they co-wrote, he sings to someone very much like Edith, the “belle” who knows that their song resonates with the experience of all those who have been in love.
As she had done with Moustaki, Davis, and other men in her life, Edith demanded that Dumont be available at all times. The composer did his best to keep her in good spirits. Exercising his sway, he had her banish Claude Figus, a bad influence since he supplied Edith with drugs. “When I knew her, she never touched alcohol, except for the occasional beer,” Dumont said. “She drank enormous amounts of tea and took far too many pills, often doubling or tripling the dosage. She said she needed them to keep on singing. People have said all sorts of things about Edith,” he continued. “They don’t realize that the scope of her career meant that she couldn’t be like the woman next door.”
To the dismay of her entourage, Piaf extended her Olympia run through the first week of April. Physically she was a shadow of herself. What was worse, having abandoned Dr. Vaimber’s holistic approach, she now relied on cortisone, Dolosal (a pain medication that leads to dependency, like morphine), and Coramine (a central-nervous-system stimulant injected shortly before she went onstage). After performances, Dumont and Barrier carried the star to her dressing room. At home, Danielle undressed her and put her to bed.
When Barrier begged Piaf to end the engagement, she said that she had to keep going for financial reasons: so many people depended