No Regrets - Carolyn Burke [30]
That night, she began singing at Chez O’Dett, on the Place Pigalle, where the young producer Bruno Coquatrix had booked her for two months. (Coquatrix lent her the money for a new black dress with sleeves, to cover her scrawny arms, and with pockets, to hide her hands.) O’Dett’s was a comedown from le Gerny’s, where she had earned more than twice as much per night. The main attraction, a drag show, drew customers from the artistic world and the homosexual elite, who were usually sympathetic. But when Edith came onstage, she faced hostile stares. “I might as well have been singing psalms,” she said. “I wonder if they’d have noticed the difference. They hadn’t come to hear a singer; they’d come to see ‘the woman in the Leplée affair.’ ”
One night, an older man stood up to lecture a member of the audience who had greeted her songs with disapproving whistles. Not only was it unfair to judge someone whose innocence had been proved, he said, but it was bad taste to whistle in a cabaret: “If she’s good, applaud, and keep your nose out of her private life.” The audience began to clap; “then, as he joined in, the applause was for me,” Piaf recalled. Hoping to put Pigalle behind her, she did not renew her contract at O’Dett’s.
Edith’s resolve to concentrate on her career may have been strengthened by the absence of Momone that spring. The police had picked up Edith’s “evil spirit” after Leplée’s murder and, on learning her age, sent her to a school for wayward girls. Without her accomplice (Berteaut said that, as Piaf’s “demon,” she deliberately encouraged her vices), Edith turned to her few remaining friends—Robert Juel, Jacques Bourgeat, and Jacques Canetti.
Juel continued to accompany her on the accordion while also acting as her bodyguard, a service that must have been reassuring when she sang at another Pigalle venue, the Ange Rouge—a particularly dangerous club, thanks to the presence of the Corsican mafia. “Jacquot” Bourgeat helped her find peace of mind by having her read the classics of philosophy, though it is hard to see how she could assimilate Plato in such volatile circumstances. Bourgeat, who loved her gaiety, enjoyed playing the role of Edith’s professor: “She was attentive, a good student, but mainly she wanted to listen.”
It was Canetti who allowed Edith to imagine a new life by having her record songs that would make her a bankable asset. In May, accompanied by a full orchestra, she cut four new tunes for Polydor. Although the violins bothered her at first, she adjusted to the new sound. Around this time, she met the composer Raymond Asso, whose lyrics for one of these songs, “Mon Amant de la Coloniale,” evoked an affair between a man in the French colonial army and the woman he leaves behind—taking advantage of the vogue for love-’em-and-leave-’em tough guys. Also through Canetti, Edith joined a traveling company called La Jeune Chanson 1936, which performed at Paris music-halls in May and June, then made its own tour de France during the summer.
While the Jeune Chanson troupe traveled around the country, French workers were enjoying their first state-sanctioned paid holidays, a Popular Front innovation that helped fill the theaters. But such revolutionary measures (the Blum government also agreed to salary increases, shop representatives,