No Regrets - Carolyn Burke [25]
One gray day in October 1935, she and Momone decided to work the area near the Arc de Triomphe, in the rue Troyon. As Edith warbled “Comme un moineau” (“Like a Sparrow”), passersby may have reflected that its image of a poor hooker—“Elle est née comme un moineau / Elle a vécu comme un moineau / Elle mourra comme un moineau” (“She was born like a sparrow / She’s lived like a sparrow / She’ll die like a sparrow”)—suited the singer’s waifish appearance. A well-groomed bystander with silvery hair declared that she would ruin her voice if she kept belting out songs that way. When Edith said that she sang in order to eat, he introduced himself as Louis Leplée and asked her to audition at his cabaret, le Gerny’s. Leplée gave her five francs and an appointment a few days later.
After checking out le Gerny’s, an elegant nightspot near the Champs-Elysées, Edith and Momone spent the night celebrating in a Pigalle bar. When Fréhel arrived, they announced their good fortune to the older singer, who said to be careful. Leplée might “inveigle” them into something underhanded, like white slavery. Having decided that Fréhel was jealous, Edith went to the audition, her flyaway bangs slicked down with soap and her one black skirt spot-treated for the occasion. Berteaut recalled, “We were so petrified we couldn’t talk.”
It would not have been obvious that le Gerny’s portly impresario was himself a habitué of Pigalle. The nephew of the successful music-hall artist Polin, Leplée had performed at the Liberty’s Bar, on the Place Blanche, with his partner, “Bobette”—a duo that flaunted their sexual orientation. A few years before taking on le Gerny’s, Leplée had run the basement club at the Palace Theater in Montmartre, to which district he still came to find young men at homosexual hangouts. That these places were linked to the milieu only enhanced their allure. That they were also dangerous—clients were sometimes victimized by their lovers—was seen as a fact of life by those who liked rough trade.
Leplée’s underworld connections were not apparent to Edith when she came to his club. She noted his elegant manners and “the tender blue of his eyes”—marks of distinction in a man, where she was concerned—as well as his limp, from a war injury. Above all, she was impressed by his kindness. “I put all my heart into my songs,” she recalled, “not so much to get an engagement, which seemed unlikely, as to please the man who had shown an interest in me and with whom I now felt a mutual trust and sympathy.”
After hearing her, Leplée asked whether she could start on October 24 at forty francs a night. He had two requirements: she was to learn some new songs, and wear something more presentable. Edith accepted on the spot, promising to finish the sweater she was knitting. (Piaf continued to knit throughout her career, but most projects were never completed.)
Her stage name came as an afterthought. She wasn’t Russian, so Tania wouldn’t do, Leplée reflected; neither would Denise Jay or Huguette Hélia. She must have a name to match what he felt as he watched her. A true Paris sparrow, she should be called La Môme Moineau, but that name was taken. Why not use the slang for sparrow, which was piaf? The singer remarked years later, “I was baptized for life.”
Like the experienced showman he was, Leplée knew how to make the most of his protégée. He would present her not as a glamorous chanteuse but as herself: the contrast between her childlike mien and her assaultive vibrato would move audiences as it had moved him. The songs he chose for her, réaliste classics about the “dangerous classes” from which she came, would play up her origins and undernourished form. “Nini peau de chien,” a Montmartre classic, portrayed its heroine’s life on the streets as a poor girl’s fate; “La Valse brune,” an insinuating prewar waltz tune, wrapped its “chevaliers de la lune” (crooks who prowl by night) in the poetry