No Regrets - Carolyn Burke [34]
In March, Asso took his protégée to watch Marie Dubas sing at the A.B.C., the city’s leading song palace. By the end of the set, Edith was dumbstruck; her eyes brimmed with tears. “Now do you understand what makes an artist great?” Asso asked. From then on, whenever she had a free evening, Edith went to the A.B.C. to study Dubas’s expressions, the way she shaped a song with gestures, her ability to provoke tears and laughter, the ease with which she modulated from one rhythm to another to reach an emotional climax. Above all it was the audience’s love for the star that moved her: “All these people, their faces full of expectation, formed one single heart together.… I too wanted the public to love me like that.”
The A.B.C.’s location—down the hill from Pigalle, on the Boulevard Poissonière—gave it the respectability lacking in joints like O’Dett’s. The director, a canny Romanian named Mitty Goldin, had chosen the theater’s name so that it would come first in directory listings; by 1937, he was booking all the best-known performers—Dubas, Fréhel, Damia, Tino Rossi, Suzy Solidor, and Lucienne Boyer. Asso tried repeatedly to get Edith a booking there, but Goldin resisted. In his view, she was inexperienced and had a bad name because of the Leplée affair. Undeterred, Asso courted the impresario until he agreed to give her a chance—as one of the acts preceding Dubas, the main attraction.
On March 26, her hair coiffed and her black dress enlivened by a white lace collar, Edith came onstage as an accordionist played her theme song, “Les Mômes de la cloche.” She was to close the first part of the program with five songs. To mark a contrast to the familiar tune that had introduced her, she launched into one of Asso’s compositions, the bittersweet “Un Jeune Homme chantait” (the tale of a man who goes off singing after taking a young girl’s virginity). Next she sang a comic number and three more Asso songs: “C’est toi le plus fort” (a woman’s confession that she allows her lover to be “the stronger one”), “Browning” (a noirish tale of a Chicago-style hoodlum in which she gleefully rolled the “r” in the man’s name), and “Le Contrebandier” (a stirring tune that claims its smuggler hero as “a sort of poet”). When the audience refused to let her go until she sang “Mon Légionnaire,” Goldin re-raised the curtain. Edith kept coming back to take her bow; Asso declared victory.
The critics agreed that La Môme was now a star. She had made “astonishing progress,” Le Figaro noted; when evoking the poorer districts, “she was quite simply remarkable.” More poetically, Paris-Soir wrote, “The frail street flower no longer wilts on the Parisian stage. Hav[ing] gained in strength and knowledgeability … she has become a very great success.” To the left-wing journalist Henri Jeanson, Edith’s was “the voice of revolt.” Listening to her rousing rendition of “Le Contrebandier,” he added, “I felt as if I were crossing the border under the nose of the authorities.”
To Maurice Verne, a critic of popular culture and a friend of Fréhel’s, La Môme’s performance brought to mind Colette’s saucy prewar heroine Claudine. “Here is the miraculous resurrection of Claudine’s short hair, her white collar … her black dress resembling a schoolgirl’s uniform.” To suit her “metallic” voice, she needed songs written just for her to tell certain kinds of stories: “réaliste portraits of working-class life, gray with the soot of factory chimneys and abuzz with tunes picked up from bistrot radios.” Years later, Piaf recalled in her memoirs, “Asso wrote songs like this for me; direct, sincere, without literary pretensions … as welcoming as a handshake.”
Despite her triumphant A.B.C. debut, Edith could not afford to rest on her laurels—particularly since Asso had accepted a low fee in order to get her a booking there. Starting on April 16, the day after her A.B.C. engagement ended, she sang at O’Dett’s and the Sirocco; then, in May, went on tour to Aix-les-Bains; Lille, Belgium; and, over the summer, eight French watering