No Regrets - Carolyn Burke [119]
Although hugely romantic, their marriage had come too late, Dumont believed—when Piaf was too ill, too diminished in her sense of herself, to enjoy it. By this time, her mind was on final things—how to transmit to her public her faith in love as their shared reason for being, for the intense spiritual bond that they felt with each other.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
1963
Piaf knew that her public was more forgiving than the critics who caviled about preachy lyrics and quavery performances. About this time, she recorded a talk meant to reveal all that she had learned from her tumultuous life. Music had long been her soul’s conduit, but she wanted to speak to her audience as friends—“because you are my friends,” she began, her voice full of warmth as she visualized them.
“I’ve never regretted anything,” she continued, paraphrasing her famous song. “Each experience brought something … that helps me to express all sorts of feeling and emotion.” First she would speak about friendship. Having hurt many of her friends without meaning to, she said that one must put oneself in the other’s place rather than exercise judgment—a principle that also applied to social problems. For example, instead of rejecting the unruly fans of rock and roll, people should try to understand them: “They want to prove something.… There’s always this threat hanging over us—war, the aftermath of war, the next war. That takes the romance out of life. But the young want to have fun, to make noise, to be part of their century.”
What mattered most was love. “Everything comes down to that, love for humanity, for work, for the things one loves, just plain love between two beings.” To live fully, people needed to find the love within, “to reveal it to yourselves.” One understood the meaning of experience, she thought, by paying the price for it and by being unselfish: “It’s extremely difficult to enjoy love to the utmost without asking for more. It’s already something to have had a little.” What was more, love, “the only emotion that money can’t buy,” existed in its own right long after the loved one’s death. Piaf ended this unusually direct talk by singing her hymn in memory of Cerdan, “La Belle Histoire d’amour”—confounding earthly and divine love in its address to the beloved who awaits her in heaven.
Whatever reservations Edith had about her marriage, she adopted Théo’s family as her own. Her sisters-in-law Cathy and Christie taught her the twist; their mother asked Edith to call her Maman, though they were nearly the same age; Edith invited twenty-year-old Christie to live with her and Théo in Paris. On the advice of Loulou Barrier, she rewrote her will to leave everything to her husband, an act that she accomplished with difficulty given her arthritic hands. To celebrate Théo’s twenty-seventh birthday, Edith shared the stage with him for a benefit performance in January in the Lamboukases’ suburb—to the delight of their friends and neighbors, who saw the star’s marriage to the coiffeur as something like a fairy tale.
The couple spent weeks rehearsing for their February engagement at the Bobino Theater in Montparnasse, where Edith first sang in 1938. Intimidated by her sister-in-law, Christie sat quietly as they went over each song in Théo’s repertoire, including several composed for him by Edith. When the young woman said that she too wanted to sing, Edith began teaching her along with Théo. As Christie Laume (a surname chosen for her by Piaf), she was to introduce the program and sing three tunes of the sort called yé-yé, the youth craze being marketed with songs that wed adolescent