No Regrets - Carolyn Burke [117]
At the end of September, some twenty-five hundred spectators applauded wildly when Edith sang with Théo at the Olympia. Seated in the front row at the gala performance, Hallyday was moved to tears, unaware that Edith was terrified after learning that Signoret and Montand, the singers Sacha Distel and Serge Gainsbourg, and the actress Michèle Morgan were in the audience. Piaf was clearly exhausted, an observer wrote; “her ravaged face resembled her most dramatic, most painful songs, her arms and body showed the stigmata of illness and suffering.” Yet she had triumphed again. She had made Théo into a singer and found the courage to envision marriage with a man twenty years her junior. The press, more cynical in their judgments, noted that her voice was harsh and had lost some of its power. Others commented on the tasteless display of Théo’s health when he sang bare-chested—a cruel contrast to Edith’s frailty.
In private, confiding her doubts to Noli, she said that though marrying Théo made no sense given the age difference, with him she felt “not only the love of a woman for a man but also another feeling that life has denied me until now: maternal love.” In the end, she thought, “only those who see wrong in everything will be offended.” Piaf knew that she did not have long to live, Dumont reflected years later: “Her marriage to this young man shocked the press and the commentators but not the people, who adored Edith and Théo. She wanted to do something mythic … to show that right to the end, she embraced love, youth, beauty. It was hugely romantic.”
Dumont was right about Edith’s public. On October 9, her wedding day, thousands of fans lined the streets of the sixteenth arrondissement to catch a glimpse of their idol, unaware that, until very recently, she had thought of changing her mind. That morning, the star’s romanticism won out over her sense of the ridiculous. With Barrier as their witness, the couple were wed in a civil ceremony by Robert Souleytis, the local mayor: “You are a great artist and a great Frenchwoman,” Souleytis told her. Then, at the Greek Orthodox church nearby, they took their vows while a chorus chanted and hundreds of candles flickered—the kind of wedding Edith had always wanted in the only church that would marry a divorcée. Théo (in a black suit and tie) kissed his wife (in a plain black dress) and smiled for the reporters, who outnumbered the guests. Prominent among them were Vassal and Noli, who took credit for talking Edith into marrying Théo for the benefit of the publicity they would receive in France Dimanche.
When the newlyweds emerged from the church, they were showered with rice from nearby windows as paparazzi struggled to record the event and the crowd shouted “bravo.” The hordes of Parisians, monitored by six busloads of police, rivaled the crowds that greeted De Gaulle or Brigitte Bardot, Paris-Jour noted. It was a case of Lolita in reverse, L’Aurore wrote, Nabokov’s novel having recently caused a scandal in France: “That Edith Piaf arranged the saddest kind of publicity for her new union with a young man who was in diapers when she was singing ‘Le Fanion de la légion’ suggests either a lack of awareness or an obsession. It’s true that artists need their public. But it’s too bad that an artist of her caliber decided to invite the public into her bedroom.” Refraining from personal remarks, an American television commentator noted that “the legendary singer of torch songs … has never lived by convention.”
The next night, the newlyweds returned to the Olympia, where they were booked until October 24. Unmoved by the bravado of their union, some critics wrote scathingly of Piaf’s performance. Her new songs were preachy; what was worse, she sang off-key. “Marie-trottoir,” a revamped lady-of-the-night number by Vaucaire and Dumont, was a tiresome form of recrimination,