No Regrets - Carolyn Burke [31]
In August, Edith wrote to Bourgeat from Lausanne, where the troupe was performing at the Maison du Peuple. Having had to replace her lost identity card, she had in the process understood that she needed to put her life in order. “I’m no longer with Jeannot, or Georges, or Marcel, or Jacques,” she told him. “I’ve decided to be serious and work hard to please my dear old Papa Leplée.” She hoped to disentangle her life from the milieu: “I’m completely disgusted by all that. I’m going to keep my dough for myself.” Promising to learn good French (the letter is full of mistakes), she swore “on Monsieur Leplée’s ashes” to reconnect with her father, who could take charge of her, and, for company, with Momone. To close this eighteen-page screed, she called Jacquot her “wildflower,” doodled a sparrow with an envelope in its beak, and signed it “didi.” (In the bulk of their correspondence, she is his “Piafou.”)
Edith found it impossible to keep her promises when Momone was released and joined her in Pigalle. The singer went back to O’Dett’s, despite the pay, since she had both of them to support. In September, she had engagements at two of the better music-halls, the Alhambra and the Trianon, and in October, through Fernand Lumbroso, an associate of Canetti’s, at the Broadway Theater in Brussels. She no doubt performed the tunes she had recorded that spring, Asso’s “Mon Amant de le Coloniale” and “Il n’est pas distingué,” sung in the persona of a streetwise accordionist called “Zidor” (a nickname for “Isidore”?), whose dislike of the current German leader turns this comic number into satire: “Moi, Hitler, j’l’ai dans le blair / Et j’peux pas le renifler.” (“I can’t stand Hitler / He gets up my nose.”)
But Edith was less concerned with the mounting European crisis than with making her way. In November, Lumbroso booked her and Momone, her presenter, for a week in Brest. Edith was to open at a theater before the main attraction, a film entitled Lucrezia Borgia, a historical drama, which, however well acted, was unlikely to attract the town’s most vocal residents, the sailors quartered there. Momone called Brest “an impossible dump” except for the sailors—“you had as many as you needed.” Their presence at the theater, where they defended Edith by picking fights with other members of the audience, and the singer’s nightly carousing prompted the manager to take action. After he rang her producer, an angry Lumbroso summoned her back to Paris.
Earlier that year, Edith had sought out Asso, who had made an impression on her when they met at a music publisher’s. After playing Asso’s latest song, “Mon Légionnaire,” the pianist introduced her to the lyricist, a tall, thin man with a big nose and an edgy manner. Though Edith said that this song did not suit her, Asso watched as she sang another of his compositions: he was moved to tears. Later that year, when Marie Dubas’s recording of “Mon Légionnaire” became a hit (the song consecrates the 1930s myth of the Foreign Legion), Edith felt as if Dubas had stolen what was hers. The lyrics seemed to echo her adventures with men in uniform.
That year, she and Asso often crossed paths in Pigalle. He thought that he could write for her but noted her lack of discipline: “She was a wild thing, … unwilling to accept any limits on her freedom.” Edith had turned to him when afraid that life was closing in on her, and one night, after the murder of Leplée, took refuge in his hotel room. She trusted the lyricist but would not comply with his demand that she lead a more orderly life and break with Momone, the “devilish girl … who followed her around like her shadow.”
In December, Lumbroso gave Edith one last chance, a booking in Nice, at the basement club of Maxim’s Restaurant. On the train to the Riviera, she