No Regrets - Carolyn Burke [144]
In this respect, memoirs by those who knew Piaf at different points have been invaluable. Maurice Maillet’s Piaf inconnue gives a piquant glimpse of her years among the small-time crooks of Pigalle, whose noir atmosphere is reflected in her early repertoire. Les Eperons de la liberté, by Paul Meurisse, who took Piaf to live in a posh part of Paris, gives a humorous and informative account of their time together at the start of World War II, a period fleshed out by Madame Billy’s La Maîtresse de “Maison,” on the later war years, when Piaf lived on the top floor of a high-class brothel.
Other reliable sources for this period and the postwar years include the journals of Maurice Chevalier and Jean Cocteau, the memoirs of Charles Aznavour, Micheline Dax, and Georges Moustaki, and, for the end of her life, accounts by Jean Noli, to whom Piaf dictated Ma vie, and Hugues Vassal, whom she allowed to photograph her in her most relaxed moments. In addition, recollections of Piaf by such figures as Jean-Louis Barrault included in Bernard Marchois’s Edith Piaf: Opinions publiques shed light on her life from a variety of angles, as does the compilation of reviews, clippings, and other related documents in Marchois’s Piaf: Emportée par la foule.
Claimants to the title of Piaf’s best friend and confidante arose some years after her death. They include Ginou Richer’s Mon amie Edith Piaf, which, like Berteaut’s memoir, illuminates Piaf’s high-spirited behavior with close friends but must also be used with caution, because of the author’s tendency to inflate her role in the star’s life. Many of Richer’s observations are contested by what is, on the whole, a more reliable source, Edith Piaf, le temps d’une vie, by Marc and Danielle Bonel, who were part of her entourage for decades and looked after her at the end of her life.
There are also dozens of biographies, both the traditional kind and the “vies romancées” (novelized lives) of the star, in French. Since the same stories and interpretations are often repeated from one book to another, I have compared their accounts for historical feasibility or verisimilitude and, when possible, retraced their sources—though this effort was hampered by the lack of footnotes in many French books, including those by Monique Lange, the next biography after Berteaut’s to reach an international readership following its publication in English. In the end, I found the most reliable of the many biographies to be Pierre Duclos and Georges Martin’s Piaf, which not only details sources to a considerable extent but also quotes significantly from her contemporaries, many of whom were alive during the time of its writing. I also relied on Jean-Dominique Brierre’s Piaf: Sans amour on n’est rien du tout, a useful summary of her place in the chanson tradition, which avoids most of the petty gossip found in other biographies. Emmanuel Bonini’s Piaf: La Vérité appeared when I had nearly completed my own book: a grab bag of information, it lacks notes and, in some cases, attributions, but provides helpful context concerning Piaf’s later years.
Like most books about Piaf published in France, the two biographies in English, by Margaret Crosland and David Bret, did not have access to the Piaf-Bourgeat correspondence, or to the letters from Piaf to other lovers that have come to light recently, nor do they appear to have drawn on accounts published in the popular press by her contemporaries. Their lives of the star, though sometimes useful, are hampered, in the case of Crosland, by the author’s expressions of disdain toward her subject’s lifestyle, and in the case of