No Regrets - Carolyn Burke [33]
Edith called her mentor Cyrano because of his sharp wit and beaky nose, but also because he wrote the kind of world-weary verse that she admired. Although the lanky ex-soldier was an improbable person to effect her transformation from street urchin into artist, Edith believed in him. She loved the luminous blue of his eyes, the sensitivity hidden beneath his swagger, his way of stroking her hair and crooning “ma petite fille” when their lessons exhausted her. He called her Didou, a nickname that suggests his almost paternal feelings for her.
At thirty-five, Asso exuded an odd glamour. Like Edith, he had fended for himself since the age of fifteen. He had been a shepherd, a smuggler, a spahi (a native soldier in the French colonial army), a ghostwriter, and, lately, a lyricist whose songs had begun to be recognized. He often collaborated with the pianist Marguerite Monnot, who had composed the music for “Mon Légionnaire”; soon she and Edith also became friends. In 1937, Asso gave Edith two of his favorite songs, “Le Fanion de la légion” (“The Foreign Legion’s Pennant,” music by Monnot) and “Mon Légionnaire” for her next recording session—when the vogue for music with doomed romances in exotic settings was at its height. In time, Piaf came to believe that Asso had written “Mon Légionnaire” for her. The quintessential song of its era, this colonial fantasy portrayed a woman’s one-night stand with the soldier who leaves her to pursue his fate in the “hot sands” of the Sahara: “J’sais pas son nom, je n’sais rien d’lui, / Il m’a aimée toute la nuit, / Mon légionnaire! / Et me laissant à mon destin / Il est parti dans le matin / Plein de lumière.… / Mon légionnaire!” (“I don’t know his name, don’t know anything about him, / He made love to me all night, / My legionnaire! / Leaving me to my fate, / He went off / In the bright morning light.… / My legionnaire!”)
Even though Asso’s “pocket tragedy” (Jean Cocteau’s phrase) seemed to evoke Edith’s past, it was also linked in her mind to the first person to record the song, Marie Dubas—whose successful career she hoped to emulate. But before Edith would be ready to sing in the music-halls like Dubas, Asso insisted, she had a great deal to learn. Her table manners had to improve if she was to feel comfortable in society; she had to dress as elegantly in daily life as she did onstage. Edith often rebelled when he showed her how to hold her knife or said to wait for the right moment rather than blurt out what was on her mind. Yet she knew instinctively that these essentials of savoir-vivre (good breeding) would help to shape her image—the “personality” that Asso kept talking about. Quarrels over such things as posture at the dinner table alternated with lessons in French poetry once Edith accepted him as her mentor, the man to complete the process she had begun with Jacques Bourgeat.
Still, her relations with Asso were more fluid than the teacher-pupil model suggests. When Edith told him stories about her past, the lyricist took notes in order to use his protégée’s life as his sourcebook. Some have called Piaf his “creation,” but one can also see her as the muse who inspired many of his best songs. Their partnership confounds fixed ideas of muse and artist: they alternated in these roles with each other. Just as Edith enabled Asso to write lyrics that he would not have composed without her, so, with his support, she honed her craft to perform these songs on the larger cultural stage. Over the three years they lived and worked together, their contentious