No Regrets - Carolyn Burke [24]
CHAPTER FOUR
1935–1936
Piaf recalled the years from 1933, when she left Belleville, to 1936, when she began extricating herself from Pigalle, as an endless walk—one punctuated by intermittent gigs, countless street songs, and many narrow escapes from both the milieu and the authorities.
She did not attend to the political scene, except perhaps to notice that Parisians had fewer coins to spare and that soup kitchens’ lines were growing longer. By 1933, 1.3 million Frenchmen were unemployed. In 1935, the week after Edith buried Cécelle, an alliance of four hundred thousand members of the Radical, Socialist, and Communist parties marched through Paris on Bastille Day, calling for “bread, peace, and liberty.” The following spring, under Léon Blum, the leftist Popular Front government accorded major reforms to the working classes.
But the topics of the day—workers’ rights, the growth of right-wing groups modeling themselves on Hitler’s Brownshirts, the rise of anti-Semitism, the Third Republic’s wobbliness—were of little concern when what mattered was just getting by. Having grown up outside established social structures, Edith did not identify with the working-class ethos of social betterment through class struggle. As a girl of the streets, she knew that her only chance to transcend them would depend on her determination and talent.
Leaving Belleville had allowed Edith to imagine another way of life, though, like most people she knew, she was almost penniless—in part because she spent whatever she earned right away. Yet she was sure that her luck would change. “People have the wrong idea about Edith,” Berteaut wrote of this time. “She wasn’t sad. She loved to laugh. She used to split her sides all the time, and what’s more, she was sure she’d make it.” She would put “this stinking poorhouse” behind her.
In these years, the music business was being transformed in response to the availability of records and radio broadcasts featuring well-known singers. Although working-class fans of la chanson could not afford tickets to the Folies Bergère, where stars like Mistinguett, Maurice Chevalier, and Josephine Baker performed, music came to them in the city’s open-air theaters—street markets, bals-musettes, outdoor fairs. Some found the time to visit the record shops on the boulevards, where one could hear one’s favorite songs in a sound booth, as Edith did in order to learn popular lyrics. But this form of enjoyment was limited to those who could pay for it, as were radios and gramophones, which were too expensive for working-class families.
Since Edith could not read music, she relied on her ability to memorize songs. When she performed this “borrowed” material (often without sheet music), “the pianist who accompanied her played however he felt like playing,” Berteaut recalled, “and Edith would sing without paying much attention to him. The surprising thing is that it worked out anyway.” Although an untrained singer, she surely sensed that speeding up or slowing down the tempo as she did (the technique called “rubato”) served to enhance a song’s emotional qualities, and that her intense, velvety vibrato suited her repertoire. She knew everything instinctively, her friend Rina Ketty observed: “Her songs expressed all she had suffered in childhood. At the end of her life she had more technique, more métier, but she couldn’t have given any more of herself, since she gave her whole heart from the beginning.”
It was this quality—giving everything she had—that led to Edith’s first engagement outside