No Regrets - Carolyn Burke [115]
One night, Figus brought with him a tall, good-looking twenty-six-year-old of Greek extraction named Théophanis Lamboukas. A hairdresser who worked at his family’s salon in the Paris suburbs, Théo had always wanted to sing; though attracted to him in his own right, Figus also saw him as a companion for Edith, now that Dumont was out of the picture. At first, intimidated by her fame, Théo hardly spoke a word—until the night he spent at the Boulevard Lannes after missing the last train home. Recalling her idyll in Athens with Takis Horn, Edith baptized the coiffeur Théo Sarapo—a surname, she said, that in Greek meant “I love you.”
Edith explained to friends that as her new secretary, Sarapo handled her correspondence, and Figus her appointments. The two men were her only visitors when she was again hospitalized in March after a bout of bronchial pneumonia, which required long hours in an oxygen tent. Noli pried the clinic’s address out of her entourage and, with Vassal, turned up to find Edith sipping tea while Figus and Sarapo drank champagne. When Piaf introduced Théo, the young man did not make a strong impression on Noli: “He was too gentle, too soft, too attentive.” Moreover, his manner seemed effeminate. Piaf asked the journalists to return the next day, when she would arrange to be in the oxygen tent for Vassal’s photograph: “In this kind of calculation she was infallible, relying solely on artistic instinct and her prodigious knowledge of her public.”
Two days after Piaf’s release from hospital, the French and the Algerians signed the Evian Accords, ending the war. More preoccupied with getting back to work than with politics, she decided to forgive Dumont. Soon she began rehearsing his new songs for her, including “Toi, tu n’entends pas,” a woman’s complaint to a lover who is deaf to her passions (circuses, carousels, crowds, poets), and whom she admonishes, “Tu les entendras / … / Le jour où tu m’aimeras!” (You will hear them / … / When you love me!”). Together they sang his “Inconnu excepté de Dieu,” a meditation on the burial site of one “known only to God”—the phrase on the graves of countless unknown soldiers—with the words intoned by Piaf in the background.
In 1962, in addition to five more of Dumont’s compositions, she recorded Mikis Theodorakis’ songs for the dance film The Lovers of Teruel (including the operatic title song and “Quatorze Juillet,” a bittersweet waltz), along with her one overtly political song, “Roulez tambours”—which she wrote about this time, perhaps thinking of all those unmarked graves. “Roll the drums,” it began: “Pour ceux qui meurent chaque jour / Pour ceux qui pleurent dans les faubourgs / Pour Hiroshima, Pearl Harbor.” (“For those who die each day / For those who weep in the slums / For Hiroshima, Pearl Harbor.”) To a litany of wars, the singer opposed her arms: love and music.
Théo’s accounts of military service in Algeria as a twenty-year-old made it clear that this experience had left scars. His vulnerability moved Piaf in the same way that Doug Davis’s similar nature had won her heart. Since leaving Edith, the American had remained in France and painted portraits of Rex Harrison, Vivien Leigh, Alice B. Toklas, and his old friend the singer Rod McKuen; he had hopes for exhibitions in both Paris and Atlanta. In April, when Doug and Edith were reconciled, she invited him to stay at the Boulevard Lannes and commissioned portraits by him of her two secretaries. One can only imagine the emotional dynamics in the apartment, but having three male companions gave Piaf the energy she needed. And if Figus and Sarapo were still lovers, Théo’s affection for Edith was obvious to all.
“Aren’t I lucky to have had so many beaux,” Piaf teased at a press conference. “They’re all young, handsome, charming, and, after knowing