No Regrets - Carolyn Burke [2]
Since Piaf’s death in 1963, she has never left the scene to which she devoted herself. Recordings, movies, theatrical presentations, biographies, and versions of her songs by others are too numerous to mention, except, perhaps, for Olivier Dahan’s recent biopic, La Môme (La Vie en rose outside France), which gives a colorful account of her picaresque childhood. But this much-admired film also resorts to the familiar template for an artist’s life—the trajectory from rags to riches with the emphasis on the sorrows (especially the addictive ones) that lead to the performer’s downfall. Such commonly held myths do a disservice by thinning the texture of a life. What is worse, they perpetuate themselves in the public mind, causing us to distort the legend of the artist at the expense of her artistry.
The cliché of Piaf as self-destructive waif is too rigid to allow for her complex humanity. Its morality-play version of her life neglects or completely ignores her courage in World War II, when she defied the Nazis by sheltering Jewish friends and aiding the Resistance. In the same way, many accounts of her life say little about her mentoring of younger singers like Yves Montand and Charles Aznavour, preferring instead to shape her story by calling them “the men in her life”—each of whom gets a chapter, as if her existence had been organized around theirs.
Nor does this template elucidate her role as a lyricist. Piaf wrote nearly one hundred songs, which were set to music by trusted collaborators like Marguerite Monnot, with whom she formed the first female songwriting team. (According to myths still in circulation, Piaf had little affection for women, a reading of her life that ignores her close friendships with protégées, members of her entourage, and peers like Monnot and actresses Micheline Dax and Marlene Dietrich.)
Finally, myths about her life neglect Piaf’s ongoing role as a muse who worked tirelessly with her collaborators. Her artistic family included both the musicians and songwriters with whom she devised melodies to embody her persona, and cultural figures like Jean Cocteau, who wrote plays for her, and the choreographer Pierre Lacotte, who created a ballet in homage to the star and to the city with which she is so completely identified. For it was in Paris that the diminutive sparrow became France’s nightingale (Cocteau’s phrase), then—following her recovery from near-fatal illness in 1959—its phoenix, its symbol of resurrection.
FITTINGLY, it was in Paris that I first heard Piaf’s throaty tremor, in the maid’s room I occupied in exchange for English lessons. Often, after climbing seven flights of stairs, I fell onto the bed and turned on the radio to hear her latest hit. In the fall of 1959, when I was studying at the Sorbonne and Piaf was pursuing what the press called her suicide tour, France was gripped by the Algerian War, then being waged in the casbahs of Algiers and the streets of Paris. Unclear about the issues but aware that bombs were exploding in public places, I retreated to my attempt to learn French by singing along with Piaf.
According to my teacher, her sharp diction and phrasing could not be improved upon, but she had learned them the hard way, having grown up with the parigot accent of the slums. This meant little to me, except that I was determined to get my tongue around those piquant sounds. Singing my way through her repertoire, I acquired a tolerable accent and a set of emotions I had not yet personally experienced, as if French culture had entered me viscerally by means of her music.
On my return to Paris in 1961, I learned that Piaf’s phoenixlike revival had occurred earlier that year: she