No Regrets - Carolyn Burke [32]
Berteaut, who joined her in Nice, recalled their stay as a continuous party, including drinking contests with the American sailors in port. Edith’s memories are more somber: “My situation wasn’t great.… Not having much money is annoying but it’s not a disaster. Losing your taste for life is far worse, and I was almost there. With the death of Leplée, I lost everything, the guidance that I so badly needed and, above all, an affectionate, irreplaceable friend.” She was on the Riviera at last but under circumstances very different from those she had imagined with Leplée. To celebrate her twenty-first birthday, she and Momone downed a bottle of wine.
“I’ve been doing a lot of stupid things,” Edith wrote Asso from Nice. She asked whether he would send her his new songs; he said that he would not think of it unless she changed her way of life. The day after her return to Paris, in January 1937, she phoned him in desperation. She would have to return to the streets unless he took charge of her, she said; Asso replied that he had been waiting for this opportunity for over a year. “Take a taxi and come right over,” he added. To Piaf, his response marked a turning point. Years later, she said of this moment, “I was saved.”
CHAPTER FIVE
1937–1939
If Leplée had fostered Edith’s talent by nurturing her self-confidence, Raymond Asso would become her Pygmalion—or, as some have said, her Svengali. Piaf believed that Asso taught her to be human. “It took him three years to cure me. Three years of patient affection to teach me that there was another world beyond that of prostitutes and pimps. Three years to cure me of Pigalle, of my chaotic childhood … to become a woman and a star instead of a phenomenon with a voice that people listened to as if being shown a rare animal at a fair.”
In retrospect, Asso saw himself as Edith’s dompteur—the tamer who breaks a wild creature of its need to scratch and bite. Only when totally exhausted, he said, “could she submit to a dompteur’s authority.” She was an uncut diamond, he continued. His role had been “to facet her, which wasn’t always easy. Her scrappy street spirit often took over. If she hadn’t had that extraordinary desire to sing, to become good, I would never have succeeded.”
The lyricist saw that his protégée had to be retrained. Edith sang as she had always done, her hands glued to her sides, her body stiff and unmoving, her few gestures awkward or repetitious. Worse, to Asso’s way of thinking, her accent was vulgar, and she was deaf to the lyrics: “Distorting the words, she deformed the most basic rhymes; she sang magnificently but without grasping the meaning.” With him she would learn to adapt her diction and phrasing to each song, and to build her career with the disciplined approach that the French call métier.
Yet to say that Asso remade Piaf is to underestimate the singer’s role in her own transformation. Though she stood like a statue onstage, she was no Galatea, nor did she simply submit to his unlikely Svengali. Aware of what Asso had to offer, Edith sought him out when she was ready to work with him, then struggled to keep her independence while being retrained—like a Parisian Eliza Doolittle. After Piaf’s death, Asso reflected on his role, which had gone beyond teaching her to pronounce words properly: “My work was to offer moral and physical guidance to a little creature who—because she had lacked the tenderness I gave her and the trust I inspired in her—would never have been more than an odd little thing on her own.” Yet her talent was so great, he confessed, that anyone in his shoes would have done the same.
Soon after Edith went to live with Asso at the Hôtel Piccadilly, the lyricist began severing her ties to the lowlife types whose influence got in the way of her career. Their hotel, just down the street from the Place Blanche, was too close to familiar