No Regrets - Carolyn Burke [27]
Through Leplée she also met Jacques Canetti, whose influential program, Radio-Cité, was broadcast on Sunday mornings. A few days after her debut at le Gerny’s, she began appearing on this popular revue. “I felt a sense of compassion for the poor little thing,” Canetti wrote, “and at the same time, enormous admiration for this burning fire, this voice that came from her heart rather than from her head.” When listeners began phoning to find out who she was, Canetti had her perform each Sunday for the next twelve weeks. By November, La Môme Piaf was such a sensation that newspapers sent reporters to le Gerny’s to interview her.
She was “a singer who lives her songs,” Le Petit Parisien declared. Their critic told readers to “imagine a pale, almost ashen visage” with “a sort of secret, pathetic nobility.” La Môme Piaf was poorly dressed, he wrote, and didn’t know how take a bow: “In fact, she doesn’t know anything. But she sings. This girl of the streets gives to her street songs the same poignant, piercing, sweetly poisonous poetry as is found in Carco’s novels.” Recognizing the literary dimension of her performance, its nostalgic poetics of Paris life, he predicted that within the year she would be singing in New York.
Another critic noted La Môme’s awkwardness onstage: she seemed “embarrassed at being so small.” But then there was her voice: “the color of oysters … that indescribable voice, which is both harsh and ample, ordinary and unique … still childlike and already full of despair, that voice that hits you in the stomach just when you’re not thinking about it.” He could not explain why it was so moving to hear her sing an old chestnut of Parisian folklore like “Les Mômes de la cloche,” since she did nothing “except to be really little, really thin, poorly coiffed … and to have that voice.”
Edith slept late and spent afternoons at the music publishers in the attempt to build her repertoire. But despite her good reviews, publishers were reluctant to entrust their new tunes to someone who had not made a record. At best she could perform those that were not under contract to better-known singers. One afternoon, in the studio of one of the few publishers willing to help, she listened to the popular soprano Annette Lajon run through a song about a sailor that sounded like one of Edith’s brief affairs. Called “L’Etranger,” it would become the prototype for Piaf’s love songs in the future: “Il avait un air très doux, / Des yeux rêveurs, un peu fous, / Aux lueurs étranges.… / Il s’en allait je ne sais où.” (“He seemed gentle / He had dreamy eyes, a little crazed, / With strange lights in them.… / He drifted away, I don’t know where.”) Edith memorized the song while Lajon rehearsed and performed it that night at the club. When Lajon showed up there a few days later, she forgave Edith, despite her annoyance.
On December 18, the day before her twentieth birthday, Edith made her first record with Canetti, at the Polydor recording studio. For her debut he chose “L’Etranger” (no longer under exclusive contract), “Les Mômes de la cloche,” and two songs in parigot slang that evoked the cheeky atmosphere of the bals-musettes (the sort of song that foreign audiences rarely heard once Piaf became famous, because of their argot and lack of fit with her “tragedienne” persona). “She was relaxed and full of fun” at the studio, Canetti observed: “she felt at ease and understood immediately what needed to be done.”
The same month, she performed in a film version of Victor Margueritte’s scandalous novel La Garçonne,