No Regrets - Carolyn Burke [126]
A week later, Paris Match published a second issue, entitled “Her Voice Will Never Die.” After noting more than three hundred thousand of her records had sold the weekend following her death (proof that there existed “an electricity of the heart” between Piaf and the people), the magazine printed an interview with Jacques Bourgeat. As her confidant, mentor, and spiritual father, he told the story of her desire to better herself. The interview closed with his pupil’s last words to him: “Our friendship will never end. Even in the Beyond, it will continue right to the end of always.”
More prosaically, the New York Times observed that France had suffered a “double loss.” The article quoted Cocteau’s last words: “The boat is going down,” he had said soon after commenting on Piaf’s death and shortly before his own. “It was a poetic image of a vanished world of people he had known who had worked with him and around him to add luster to contemporary French culture,” the reporter explained for the benefit of American readers.
Whereas the Times accorded greater significance to the death of the poet, the French press kept publishing special features on the singer. Ten days after Piaf’s funeral, France Dimanche published an edition that included a letter said to be her “last confession.” It reads: “Suddenly I feel the need for purity, the desire to weep that used to overtake me when I was a little girl. The desire to rest my head on a friendly shoulder, to close my eyes and, finally, to rest. When I think of my life, all that debauchery, that waste of strength, I’m ashamed. When I look back on that little woman in her fur coat dragging her loneliness and ennui through the night, I think that that’s what Piaf was. I ask everyone’s forgiveness. When you read this letter, to be published after my death, do not cry.”
Piaf’s “confession” has never been authenticated. If she did write it, she failed to see what her life meant to those whose forgiveness she requested. Like her public, she thought in terms of saints and sinners—the Madonna and the Magdalene—when it came to judging a woman. Yet her refusal of self-pity also shows what Piaf was: a people’s diva whose courage matched her extraordinary gifts, a soul who gave of herself until there was nothing left but her voice and the echo of her laughter. It was her deep-throated laugh, Aznavour believed, “that freed her from anguish, sorrow, and fear—her only fear, of being unable to go onstage to win over the crowds who loved her.” Decades later, he still missed her anarchic laughter. More than anything, he thought, it expressed her life’s hectic drama, its boundless joie de vivre.
Coda
As one might expect, Piaf’s admirers and music-business colleagues showed their bereavement in different ways. Marcel Blistène’s farewell to her, Au revoir Edith, was written in great haste the weekend after her death; it reached bookstores a week later. By this time, her records had sold out all over France; Pathé and Philips rushed to replenish their stocks while the mass mourning continued. Tributes with titles like “Ils parlent d’elle” (“They Talk About Her”) were shown before feature films at Gaumont cinemas throughout the year.
On the first anniversary of her death, Pierre Desgraupes presented a television special—La Mort d’Edith Piaf, a documentary including Marc Bonel’s movies of Edith recuperating from an illness months before her 1960 Olympia triumph. Almost immediately a controversy broke out in the press, which accused Desgraupes and the Bonels of morbid sensationalism. (“There could be