No Regrets - Carolyn Burke [22]
Like le Breton, the Clair de Lune staff wondered why Edith accepted the codes of Pigalle. “It was a mystery to us,” the bartender said, “why, for the sake of love, she would submit to a life full of disillusionment.” (He did not reflect that her life with her father had predisposed her to having a boss who took her earnings and dictated her behavior.) Of her friendship with a young waiter, a country boy who was the butt of the local gang’s taunts, the bartender recalled, “They understood each other’s humiliation.” One day Edith told Tarzan to leave the waiter alone. From then on the young man tried to help her, but on confronting Tarzan for his loutish ways with women, received a beating. Edith warned him, “Around here the strongest one always gets the last word.”
Years later, Piaf recalled the “life-saving shock” she received when her friend Nadia drowned herself. Nadia’s protector, who was one of Valette’s henchmen, had threatened to beat her if she didn’t work the streets. Nadia came to Edith in tears. She had tried to oblige but failed to entice any customers. A few days later, Nadia’s body was found in the Seine. “I realized just how low I’d sunk,” Piaf said. “That was the day when I decided … to escape from the milieu, to climb out of the depths on my own.” (Though she spoke openly of the fate of female prostitutes, she did not mention the equally dangerous homosexual trade that flourished at the Clair de la Lune.)
Piaf’s account of her attempts to leave Valette ring true even though they suggest scenes from a film noir. When he showed up at the Clair de la Lune after Nadia’s death, Edith said that she did not want to see him again. A few days later, his cronies took her to his room. He could kill her, she told him, but she had made up her mind. To her amazement, “the tough guy threw himself on the bed and wept” and she “took the opportunity to disappear.” But the story did not end there. Summoned to a café by her lover, she found him and his henchmen waiting. They threatened to shoot her unless she obeyed; she dared them to go ahead. A bystander deflected the shot; the bullet grazed her neck; Valette’s honor was satisfied.
Edith became adept at being seen to honor the local codes of behavior while doing as she pleased. “I had a desperate, almost morbid, need to be loved,” she reflected near the end of her life. Perhaps to convince herself that she was lovable after her experience with Valette, she took up with three men at the same time: “I acccomplished miracles to see all of them.” But her memoir minimizes the reason for her feeling “ugly, wretched, all but unlovable”—the lasting hurt caused by her mother’s abandonment of her, which would be revived by Line’s reappearance in Edith’s life just as she was making a name for herself in their shared profession.
Edith chose different stage names for different venues. She performed at La Coupole, Le Sirocco, Le Tourbillon (where she also swept the floor), and at a dance hall near the Place de la République where the great Damia went to hear the woman described as “a tiny little dame” singing the songs for which the older star had become famous. No longer calling herself “Miss Edith,” she was by turns Denise Jay, Huguette Hélia, and Tania. Between engagements, Edith went back to singing in the streets, which may explain how Line, who also lived in Pigalle, learned that her daughter had joined her there.
It would have been heartbreaking to run into her mother in these circumstances. Line sang at low dives whose customers ignored her; she was paid in glasses of wine. When not performing, she eked out a living selling herbs in the markets. Once she knew how to find Edith, Line turned up at her hotel to ask for money. Edith gave her what she could, although her earnings were unpredictable and she had to pay the woman who looked after Cécelle while Louis worked. The Clair de la Lune’s bartender watched Line