No Regrets - Carolyn Burke [121]
Though in excellent spirits, Edith seemed even smaller—“as if she had shrunk back into her illness,” Noli wrote. Only close friends knew that each night Lucien Vaimber waited backstage to manipulate her spine between numbers, Danielle Bonel brewed the teas that kept her in voice, and Simone Margantin, the private nurse who lived at the Boulevard Lannes, stood by. To control her digestive disorder, Edith ate only dishes made at home or the unvarying menu prepared at the theater by Danielle (noodles, chopped steak, and canned apricots). Margantin, Noli’s source for news, told him that, in addition to arthritis and acute liver damage, Piaf was suffering from insomnia, for which she took sleeping pills that had to be counteracted by injections the next day. “Edith is using herself up,” Margantin believed. “She still has enough nervous energy, but one day, … she’ll find that she is totally empty.”
Still running on nervous energy, Piaf gave an impromptu concert with Théo at Chez Patachou, in Montmartre, on March 24, which no doubt recalled her stints in the local dives thirty years earlier. The couple performed together at cinemas in Paris and Amiens while Edith suffered a bout of bronchitis. Still coughing, she went with her entourage to Lille, the capital of northern France, where she had lived like a Gypsy with her father. Four decades later, she was to sing at the Opera House, but because of a transport strike it was half empty for her recitals at the end of March. “Lille is a horrible memory,” Danielle recalled. “Very few people in the theater, Edith exhausted. We didn’t know that she would never appear onstage again. Lit by the projectors, she stood there like a brave little soldier to receive the last applause from the public that she loved so much and served so well.”
Piaf recovered in time to record what would be her last song, “L’Homme de Berlin.” Michèle Vendôme, the lyricist, recalled that the original title, “The Man From Bilbao,” was changed at Piaf’s insistence, because, she told Vendôme, “Nothing happens in Bilbao but there’s a lot going on in Berlin.” The young woman continued: “When I was writing for her, I felt I understood her. I felt as if I were speaking through her.… Being close to this woman who was very funny, sometimes very cruel, inspired me. At the same time it was nightmarish, a terrible worry to see her at the end.” “L’Homme de Berlin” ended on a defiant note tinged with sadness: to her unfaithful lover Piaf sang over and over, “Il n’y a pas que lui” (“He’s not the only one”), until these brave words faded to the poignant final “que lui” (“the only one”).
In April, Piaf was rushed to a clinic in Neuilly for a blood transfusion when it was learned that her red-blood-cell count was dangerously low. Only semi-conscious, she sang her entire repertoire over her first few days there, before lapsing into delirium and another hepatic coma. Théo donated his blood, type A positive, like Edith’s; Barrier canceled all engagements; her entourage tried to hide her illness from the press by claiming that it was Théo who needed medical attention. By May 1, when the Bonels brought her the traditional bouquet of lilies of the valley, she weighed only thirty kilos (sixty-six pounds), yet had regained her spirit. They were to spend the summer on the Riviera, where she would start rehearsing again once she had made a full recovery.
Before leaving for La Serena, the seaside villa that Edith had rented for June and July, she received a note from Cocteau, who had himself just recovered from a serious illness. It read: “My Edith, Released from death I don’t know quite how (that’s what we do, you and I) I embrace you because you are one of the seven or eight people to whom I send tender thoughts daily.”
On May 3, Edith, Théo, and her entourage—Simone Margantin, the Bonels, Francis Lai, Noël Commaret,