No Regrets - Carolyn Burke [26]
By the twenty-fourth Edith knew her repertoire but had not completed her sweater, which lacked a sleeve. Dismayed by her appearance, Leplée found a solution with the help of Maurice Chevalier’s wife, the actress Yvonne Vallée, who was in the audience that night. Vallée gave Edith her white silk scarf for good luck and to distinguish her from other réaliste singers, who draped their shoulders in red ones. “I was dressed like a pauper but she paid no attention to that and treated me … like an artiste,” Piaf said years later.
Nearly paralyzed with stage fright, she made the sign of the cross while Leplée told the audience that he had found his new attraction in the street. “Her voice overwhelmed me,” he continued. “I am presenting her to you as she was when I first saw her: no makeup, no stockings, in a cheap little skirt.”
Edith came onto a stage lit by harsh orange spots, the “in” color of the moment. Standing motionless to hide her bare arm, she launched into the most theatrical of the songs Leplée had chosen for her, “Les Mômes de la cloche”—about the feral girls who “drag their soiled hose and love stories along the boulevards”: “C’est nous les mômes, les mômes de la cloche, / Clochards qui s’en vont sans un rond en poche, / C’est nous les paumées, les purées d’paumées, / Qui sommes aimées un soir, n’importe où.” (“We’re the poor girls, the poor kids / We roam around broke, / We’re the rejects, outcast girls, / We’re loved for a night, it doesn’t matter where.”)
It was as if a guttersnipe had invaded the inner sanctum where sophisticates like Chevalier, Vallée, and the aviator Jean Mermoz sat drinking champagne. Yet as the guests, electrified by her voice, put down their glasses, Edith sensed that she held them. She threw up her arms at the end of the song; the scarf fell from her shoulders. There was silence, then wild applause and shouts of “bravo.” “That kid sings straight from the guts,” Chevalier cried.
She finished her repertoire in a trance. “You really had them,” Leplée kept saying. “You’ll have them again tomorrow and every other day.” Mermoz, a French national hero who was said to love poetry, offered her champagne and, on another night, bought the contents of the flower seller’s basket to show his appreciation—the first time Edith had ever received flowers. “These courtesies, from someone like Mermoz, astonished me,” Piaf said years later.
Still, the young performer lacked confidence. “When I think of the way that I sang in those days, I have to confess that my ‘talent’ was of an extremely dubious nature.” She knew that certain patrons came to gape at her as if she were a specimen, that some thought her vulgar. Her ignorance of conventions made her doubt herself. “You’re doing fine,” Leplée assured her. “When you recognize your shortcomings you can do something about them. It’s a matter of determination and hard work.”
She did not immediately take his advice. With Momone in tow, Edith returned to the Pigalle bars, where Fréhel listened scornfully as she raved about her new friends. Edith was no one until composers wrote songs just for her, Fréhel said; this lucky break would not last unless she made her name with recordings. The denizens of the Clair de la Lune were also skeptical about Leplée, but Edith insisted that he was like a father to her—he was helping her take herself seriously.
Two of Leplée’s friends asked to meet Edith as soon as they heard her sing. The first, a middle-aged man named Jacques Bourgeat, had fallen in love with her voice and wanted to help her career. An autodidact who spent his days in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Bourgeat wrote poetry when he was not studying French history. “Jacquot” would become Piaf’s mentor, confidant, and spiritual guide. He often walked her from her hotel to le Gerny’s and home again, reveling